By John Hodgen

Suffice it to say we’re all that we have. We’re tagged. We’re it,
despite the occasional monoliths that pop up in Nevada deserts
begging us to believe we host astral visitors or nascent iterations
of ourselves. All in all it’s pretty clear. It’s just us who keep showing
up, and who, given enough time to gather the shards and bits of our
thoughts, are trying, albeit admittedly, intermittently, to figure it out,
the it being this-messy-business-fix-that-we’re-in, this requisite
dog and pony miracle show. It’s in all our next breaths, our Where
did it go?, I had it right here, the it that we’ve lost, that we held so tight
in the palms of our hands the way the prophet Isaiah says we are
held. The it long gone now, like eternity, like Puttin’ on the Ritz,
the itsy-bitsy spider, the Iditarod without snow. Heavy hits there,
though we know (do we not?) that children hold the half-lit world
in their eyes each night, holding out for one more Stuart Little,
one more peep out of us before drifting off in little candle boats,
planes and canoes, as if they’re in some children’s edition of Casablanca
in Sanskrit, with their letters of transit to infinite, immaculate sleep.

By John Hodgen

Plead with me, pray for the real Émile Dickens, unknown novelist/poet/autodidact, that he be found,
culled, called from the lost regions of the unimagined dead, with all due speed, by acclamation. May he be
remembered for saying that truth and death are a woman disrobing in heaven and also in hell. May he be
hailed as laureate, as Sophie’s last choice. May his every word be revered, his magnum opus rediscovered,
The Chosen One, each word a new child with a soup bowl only asking for more. May he know no shame
nor dereliction. May his ranks never close. May he have all new clothes. May he be lauded for leaving
his bleak house, his hard times, for enduring all of our twists, for exceeding our greatest expectations.
May Death itself die like John Donne, like bloody Keats, hapless Chuzzlewit or faithful Micawber.
May it be that Death’s heartless heart yearns. May Death die in a library sumptuous, vast as Parnassus
among copper fields and forests of urns. May he die hearing there’s no such author as Life, that Life
is pure fiction, a story, a poem, that he must venture alone into a book depository, where presidents
and dreams are killed, where everything burns. May there always be a poet named Emily or Émile,
waiting at a train station, another train coming in, how it chuffs and begins, how one might glance
out a window for just a moment askance to see someone feverishly and forever beating the dickens
out of a poem the way Dylan dropped the lyrics to “Subterranean Homesick Blues” on oversized
hand-lettered cards with Allen Ginsberg standing in an alley in London outside the Savoy Hotel
where words and worlds coincide with everyone we’ve ever loved and everyone who’s died,
carriages pulling up to the station outside, hundreds of them, millions, on which we can ride.

By Rose Skelton

I meet Conor in the spruce forest. He whistles his whereabouts; I return his call. It’s mid-July and a mild summer wind breathes through the trees, a low moan that envelops us in the cool island gloam. I follow the sound and scour the ground for what mushrooms might be growing: summer chanterelle, puffball, deceiver. It’s the kind of forensic looking that I begin in July and don’t give up until the trees are naked and the hills are the color of rust. A fast, careful, sieving of images—birch leaf, tree root, crisp packet, coin—a longrange and close-up searching for the gifts of this Scottish island: the edible, the poisonous, the one in a million. The friend that took me two years to meet, though we lived in the same small town. The mushrooms he taught me how to find.

It is the first year of the pandemic and we have fled Texas where my wife, Nomi, has a job at a university, for the Hebridean island that is—was—my home. Nomi desperately wants a baby, has done for a decade, long before we met. She and I have been fighting about it for four years, as long as we’ve been together. But we are thirty-nine and forty-one now and it is probably too late. What do I want? I want not to argue about it anymore, not to have to go through the high-cost, low-chance medical procedures that I fear will rip us apart. I want not to have to choose sperm from a roster of men who claim to look like Tom Hanks. I want not to bring up a child in America.

By Tim Craven

Rare and degenerative, the condition arrived
without warning: a Tarantula for an index finger,
its swollen mocha abdomen fused to the knuckle
as though the lines embossed across my palm
were the net of its silk-spun web.
Then a Huntsman where I’d last seen
my right thumb. Doctors counted the eyes,
plucked legs for biopsies;
an experimental ointment was prescribed.
I made do with my hands stuffed in my pockets,
opening jars in an elbow’s crook.
I almost forgot my plight until two small Sheet Weavers
busied themselves replacing my pinkies.
Then the Trapdoor, the Wolf, the Brown Recluse.

Why me? Why not the neighbor’s son?
I’d chop off my arms were I able to grip
the necessary instrument.
My only solace comes at night
when the inquisitive pointed fingers
of children are tucked up in bed.
I drink whiskey and ginger through a straw
and telephone a friend whose own suffering
makes me feel as though I’ve won a prize.
She has experts stumped: an inoperable alligator
is wrapped around her intestines and any day now
its merciless jaws will snap shut for good.

By Michael Carlson

The whiteboard was blank, leaning against our elm tree. I uncapped my marker and wrote: “Broke and Craving Pancakes.”

Our red tent had broken zipper teeth. The nylon flap hung open, curled like a sick tongue. I ducked inside, knelt by Shay wrapped in a sleeping bag, and rubbed his shoulder until he woke. Purplish-brown eyes, low-stubbled jaw. Long black hair splayed across a thin pillowcase.

I smoked a cigarette in my rocking chair. Shay emerged into the honeyed light, scratching the back of his head. He took forever with his tan work boots, the gum-soled ones I had lifted from Walmart. Mouth open and laces in hand, Shay watched a robin striking dirt.

“Come on, I’m hungry,” I said, handing him a cigarette.

By Robin Rosen Chang

My memory wanders like a dog,
searching for treats and looking for balls,

but my mother’s memory
never lost track of anything,

like the time I didn’t call her
in the hospital after her surgery
when I was thirteen,

or the time I told her I wanted
to live with my father
and his new wife,

or the time the police questioned me
after someone torched a neighbor’s fence.

I wish I could’ve told her I’m sorry
but her memory slunk away.

My memory fetches old bones, reminders
I strayed. Across a border,
I smuggled dope. I swallowed
unprescribed prescription pills,
was careless with sex.

Is it worse to recollect or forget?

I wonder if this dog will get lost.
Will it skulk from yard to yard
or stand at the fence, yelping
and howling at nothing?

By William Olsen

Driving in rising fog to my fading father, I’m surrounded
as if by a mind of erasure, turning trees into apparitions,
so they look dead in fog, even the young ones, especially
dead-looking are the young ones receding in staked lines
into the absence where still other trees have already receded,
the stubble fields are no more, houses are no more,
no more human memory, and the straightaway road
drops away with the seeming duty of reaching my father—
released are the proximities and distances of eyesight,
yet the usual dread, holding the wheel, is not stopping at all,
a shallows of headlit asphalt always just ahead,
a highway of missing fields, fog risen from the unseen—
too everywhere to have an end or a beginning,
the car lights have no past—no place on earth—

By Julie Danho

I see him while brushing past—
bird’s-nest blond, raggedy
goatee, the striped hoodie

rough as burlap—but when
I open the bathroom door,
I look at myself and laugh

because I’m forty-five,
and so, somewhere, is he,
and the man-boy out there

with his latte and Nietzsche
must be in his early twenties,
the same as Adam in my dorm

about to play me the Pixies,
holding the disc by the edges
like a diamond, wearing

on his wrist a cafeteria spoon
that matched the one (where
could it be?) he’d just given me.

By Madalyn Hochendoner

I didn’t know what quality
over quantity meant

a buck knife you win
at the auction?

skin mount the ten-point
western mount the rest

all I knew was I wanted
to be endless

stuff me full of salt
keep me on ice

me and my shadow
in the alien field

low shrubs
and no topsoil

what would it take
call me a coward

stuck between the river
and the lightning

all sky

By Madalyn Hochendoner

in the longstanding practice of reading
on the train

and it reminds me of other solo pursuits:

pogo-sticking to the end of the driveway
and back,

buttoning up the front of a shirt, then
tucking it in,

ordering the bowl of clams

body popped open

like a compact, like a flip phone

like a hand motioning—blah blah blah

trying to still-life it

to still-love it

By Kaitlin Roberts

SUMMER

He pushes me in the shopping cart and we hurtle down Wühlischstraße, blasting Morrissey on a speaker and swerving past old men collecting bottles and past Berghain kids, who suck on vapes. I’m twenty-seven and high on speed with a boyfriend who’s too young to rent a car but old enough to push me on four rickety wheels through a heat wave, going nowhere.

We blaze through crosswalks and thunk-thunk over sidewalk cracks, and I don’t make sure he’s looking both ways. I shut my eyes, cover my ears. I don’t want to find out what’s next.

We’ve been going fast all summer. We wear trash black clothes from Humana and drink Rotkäppchen straight from the bottle. We skip club lines and go to bathrooms that smell like three-day-old piss. With the student card of the university where I’m enrolled but never go, we cut fat lines of Calvin Klein on a cracked phone screen and make them disappear, and it’s magic on the dance floor, where we thrash under hot red lights and sweat with strangers, best friends we’ll never see again. Then we’re back in the bathrooms, where sometimes it’s a hahaha-amount of drugs and sometimes so much our brains hurt and we have to bum hand-rolled cigarettes, and hast du Feuer? And when we finally come down, teeth-grinding and mascara running, we leave wincing at the sunlight and shielding our ears to drown out the birds—because we hate the birds, black hooded crows that eat garbage and gossip on car hoods. They say it’s daytime, high noon, that we’ve been fooled, that nothing is magic, but mostly they say we’re fuck-ups. You hear them? Fuck-up, fuck-up, fuck-up, they call from the trees where they’re the high ones now.

By Emma Wynn

My mother-in-law is upside down ⠀⠀⠀⠀in the dumpster
rooting, somewhere ⠀⠀⠀⠀under the urine-soaked towels
and splintered wood there is a magazine ⠀⠀⠀⠀she hasn’t read
a stained jacket three sizes too small ⠀⠀⠀⠀she knows
she’ll wear again ⠀⠀⠀⠀my partner and I have flown cross-country
to shake mouse droppings ⠀⠀⠀⠀out of her blankets
scrape dirt off the floors ⠀⠀⠀⠀with a putty knife, trash
the medicine tubes ⠀⠀⠀⠀expired before I was born
there’s only one twin bed for us to share ⠀⠀⠀⠀no real food
in the fridge just chutneys on every shelf ⠀⠀⠀⠀every room
a warren of narrow passages ⠀⠀⠀⠀walled with books
about to avalanche ⠀⠀⠀⠀and bury the dogs
barreling in and out ⠀⠀⠀⠀the broken doors
the L.A. dust sifts in everywhere ⠀⠀⠀⠀as if the desert
wants to erase us, she says ⠀⠀⠀⠀I want to take everything beautiful
from her ⠀⠀⠀⠀her son, her broken antiques, the organ
in the living room she can’t play ⠀⠀⠀⠀your mind, she says is
a narrow room ⠀⠀⠀⠀shuttered and cold, an artist
would see ⠀⠀⠀⠀how the room of old newspapers
is only waiting to unfold ⠀⠀⠀⠀into a flock of birds and lift off
through the hole in the roof ⠀⠀⠀⠀I see her dying in a fire
and haul them in stacks to the curb ⠀⠀⠀⠀where she’s dumpster-diving
for the treasures she’s lost ⠀⠀⠀⠀my partner staggers down the path
with another load ⠀⠀⠀⠀sneezing black mucus
and spitting grit ⠀⠀⠀⠀and I need them
to set everything down ⠀⠀⠀⠀give me just a breath, see
we’re the precious rubbish ⠀⠀⠀⠀that has been here all along

By Nancy Eimers

Night and the City (1950, dir. Jules Dassin)

Harry Fabian, stop running across the screen and into the distance
made of alleys and doorways, streets crisscrossing streets
of neon signs with their loops of the cold light any city knows—
stop, because you will have to run again at the end of the movie
that ends you by throwing your body into the river and having a cigarette
flicked after it. How traitorous your flapping coat and trousers and
your comical two-toned shoes. And yet you believed them.
Critics say this movie is modern because it is tough on its characters,
Harry having a “slimy glee,” and yet how his horsy teeth protrude pathetically
when he smiles, how his face sweats each time nobody lends him money,
how the dapper suit comes unbuttoned and gapes and dirties as he runs
toward the end and his eyes look horrified as if he’d found himself beneath a bridge
beyond which it is night and the city burning. This man could push his girlfriend down
in the street and leave her there—in the layers of grays and grims, no white—
or maybe terror is pitiable beyond mercy just for a moment,
maybe each alley is a doorway hoping St. Augustine would even now say brother,
let us long, because we are to be filled…. Longing has one ending,
longing has another. In one, the girlfriend is comforted by a friend,
in another the hiss of a cigarette tossed into water has the final say. Could Harry be said
to have a soul, even his clothing tries to make the man, and he inside
now frightened now upbeat, the and in one and two and three and four
has him running a last little while, if only as far as the bridge.

By Kelan Nee

It woke me, the high slung
pitch & swoop of sound.
Someone told me once
that a cardinal holds a soul
of someone lost: red, tufting.
& every day for two years
cardinals descended
on the locust tree,
the only one in the backyard.
More than I could count.
& I learned their songs. I
learned how they sing.
Until I moved. Now I know
a man who lost his son.
He rides his bike & sees
his boy in robins. He told me
I don’t believe it’s the spirit
of my son, but I see them
& I think—& I like it.
& there you are today:
careless, sitting on the peak
of the wooden fence, blazing.
The sky today is too blue,
cloudless, for this kind
of stillness. Sometimes
I make your noise
back to you with my mouth.
Most times I watch
the feathers fill & deflate,
count their creases
like a well-worn face.
& today, at least, I like it.

By Charlie Schneider

The Big Man was to walk five iron steps up to the linoleum ante-level behind the curtains; someone was to hold out a cup of water if he was thirsty. He was to turn left, flashing trademark alligator-print sock, then walk three paces into the danger zone near the edge of the camera’s eye, then look at the sign that said PAST THIS POINT YOU ARE ON CAMERA so he could adjust himself in any sense before seducing the millions, or trying to. There is a better world, folks, he was to say, where we meet the crawling deserts with a trillion trees, where we shake hands after work worth doing, where money’s just confetti for the grand opening of a high-speed train-line, where there’s meatless meat on every plate, local and delicious, where guilt is optional, a novelty, et cetera.

Trouble was, I didn’t tape around a single sniveling ruffle of carpet. Did the Big Man trip? He did. Did he fall? He did. Knee fractured, image dented. My job? Way gone. Three months later the primary draws near, and all I’m doing is plundering my savings and rollerblading. I’m the champion of Bleloch Street; I know all its heaves and divots. The larches in my apartment complex’s court- yard whisper: now is the time, get your job back, stop moping, call Tricia, find another candidate, get back in the ring, don’t forget us, call Tricia.

By Susan Blackwell Ramsey

That house on the corner is for sale
again. Last week it flaunted SOLD

over the gap-toothed retaining wall,
the sparse weeds in the barren beds,

the desiccated hedge. And now
the sign is gone. So are the weeds.

The fallen bricks are balanced back
into the wall, and near the steps

someone has mulched the beds halfway,
as far as a single bag goes.

I laugh, it feels so personal.
I recognize the scramble up

that gravel bank, repair instead
of maintenance—my housekeeping,

my teeth, my spine, my charity,
all after-patched, too little too late.

My mental double-entry weighs
regret against effort and expense,

while sloth and wishful thinking keep
both thumbs on the scale. I have two friends

who silently agreed to let
their house disintegrate, then sold

“As Is” and walked away content.
Bad for a body or realtor, still

I nod companionably at that mulch.
Maybe too little will be enough.

We asked ten writers to comment on the use of dance and dance imagery in poems. The following feature includes:

• Sara Henning on Ross Gay’s “Burial”
• Sarah Nance on Lucille Clifton’s “untitled” (1991), “God send easter,” “spring song,” “homage to my hair,” “my dream about being white,” “untitled” (1996), “the poet,” “from the cadaver,” “amazons,” “in salem,” and “1994”
• Christopher Kempf on Frank Bidart’s “Ulanova at Forty-Six at Last Dances Before a Camera Giselle”
• Hugh Martin on Yusef Komunayakaa’s “To Have Danced with Death”
• Jesse Lee Kercheval on Gerald Stern’s “The Dancing”
• Jennifer Schomburg Kanke on Annie Finch and The Furious Sun in Her Mane
• Bonnie Proudfoot on Rainer Maria Rilke’s “The Spanish Dancer”
• Therese Gleason on Anne Sexton’s “How We Danced” and “The Wedding Ring Dance”

Subsequently, we added six essays to an online expansion of this feature. Those are:

• Lisa Bellamy: “‘The Dancing’, by Gerald Stern”
• Maya Sonenberg’s “Dada Dance”
• Karen Hildebrand’s “Blinded by Love”
• Jocelyn Heath’s and Joanna Eleftheriou’s “girls/all night long: (re)constructing sappho”
• Renée K. Nicholson’s “Sur Les Pointes”
• Victoria Hudson Hayes’s “why,it is love”

By Sara Henning

My mother never took formal dance lessons, but that didn’t stop her from hanging a large portrait of Mikhail Nikolayevich Baryshnikov in our living room. Saturday afternoons, I’d sometimes catch her, bare feet and leg warmers, leaping across the kitchen floor or spinning like a top, MTV blaring. She danced without form or technique and since I, too, was not a dancer, I had neither knowledge nor language for the magic she created with her body: jeté, pirouette. What mattered was that I saw my single mother joyful in the kitchen of our small duplex. I saw my mother—same woman forced to bury my father a handful of years before—exuberant. I didn’t know how important these small moments of joy would be when my mother was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer at the age of 59, how I would hold onto them when bilirubin from a failed liver turned her jaundiced, how I would hold them even harder as she was moved to hospice, my desperate daughter’s clutch becoming vice grip as she took her last breath in May of 2016.

Shortly after my mother passed away, I encountered a copy of Ross Gay’s gorgeous collection of poems Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude (2015), which I devoured in one sitting. It was during this time that I discovered his remarkable poem “Burial,” a poem I would turn to constantly during the throes of my personal mourning.

By Hugh Martin

If “America is,” as John Updike wrote, “a vast conspiracy to make you happy,” then one might look—though, for awhile, you couldn’t look—at President Bush’s 1991 blanket ban on photographing coffins carrying dead American soldiers. Maybe the ban didn’t ensure “happiness,” but it did conspire to make sure the American public wouldn’t be bothered with images which might, perhaps, provoke unhappiness, or at least some discomfort.

In Yusef Komunyakaa’s poem, “To Have Danced With Death,” from his 1988 collection Dien Cai Dau, the narrator recounts returning alongside other soldiers from Vietnam, and then trying to exit the plane as two hearses arrive. As the speaker waits in line, he describes how their return gets halted, abruptly, when a “black sergeant first class . . . / stalled us on the ramp.” Shattering any warm and fuzzy feelings about homecoming, the speaker quips that this sergeant “didn’t kiss the ground either.” From there, the bleakness intensifies: “ . . . two hearses sheened up to the plane / & government silver-gray coffins / rolled out on silent chrome coasters.” Bizarre as it sounds, these hearses appear to provide brand-new coffins for the bodies of soldiers, probably in body bags or other containers, still on the plane.

By Jesse Lee Kercheval

Gerald Stern’s “The Dancing” included in This Time: New and Selected Poems (W.W. Norton & Company, 1984) begins like this:

      In all these rotten shops, in all this broken furniture
      and wrinkled ties and baseball trophies and coffee pots
      I have never seen a postwar Philco
      with the automatic eye
      nor heard Ravel’s “Bolero” the way I did
      in 1945 in that tiny living room
      on Beechwood Boulevard, nor danced as I did
      then, my knives all flashing, my hair all streaming,
      my mother red with laughter, my father cupping
      his left hand under his armpit, doing the dance
      of old Ukraine . . .

When I read this poem I see a child-sized version of the adult Gerry Stern I knew, dancing, spinning in circles. I see him as he was in 1984 when I took a class with him at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, his bald dome framed by unruly dandelion puffs of gray hair. He was 59 then, but young in the time he had spent in poetry world. His second book, Lucky Life, the one that turned the world’s eye his way, had been published just seven years earlier in 1977 when he was already 52.

By Jennifer Schomburg Kanke

I went to a party once during my doctoral program where I noticed a man weaving back and forth as he chatted up some of the young women in the program. It wasn’t full on creepy, just sort of . . . odd. As I got closer to the group, I noticed that his speech was also a bit off, but in a mesmerizing way. He didn’t seem drunk. He didn’t seem on the make (or at least not more so than many other people there). But what was going on here? When I asked a friend about him, she said, “Oh, that’s his thing. Dude comes to every party talking in iambic pentameter like it’s 1606 or something.”

Was it an intentional flex? Maybe. But another possibility is that it was just the aftereffects of his intense study of early modern English literature. He might have been inadvertently engaged in what feminist poet and critic Annie Finch has called “en-rhythming.” In her book How to Scan a Poem, Finch defines en-rhythming as “the process of accustoming one’s ear and body to the sound of a particular rhythm in preparation for writing, reading, or scanning that meter.” According to Finch, the process can work by reading poems out loud, making music with a drum, or dancing in time with the desired meter/rhythm. Could it have been that all of his exposure to Shakespeare and Donne left those iambs so stuck to his soul that he couldn’t even engage in small talk without the echo of blank verse in the wings?