By Kate Fox

A glance held long and a stolen kiss,
This is how I remember you best.
—Richard Shindell

Little fires light themselves in the hearth, like tongues
                of flame that reclaim the Holy Spirit, like pitchforks

in this clapboard house where mayflies swarm and crackle
                against the porch light. On down, a gas station, a five-and-dime,

and your house, which I can see from the kitchen, where
                clothes on the line billow and collapse, billow and collapse.

This small town holds everything I will ever know and have
                to leave behind: bidden and forbidden glances,

voices from the second-floor landing that warn, Go no further.
                Night will fall and you will fall with it. Which is what I want,

for the universe to take up where I leave off, this longing
                so deep it can hold entire planets in its bottomless pocket,

yet shrink to the size of a finger at the hollow of your neck,
                heart drawing blood from the branchwork of your breathing.

By Jon Fischer

Far off in a vacant field beside an irrigation
canal alights a stately gray heron

or a plastic bag. The plastic bag flaps
and in the tricky light thick clouds leave behind

trembles in and out of translucence,
just like a heron. The heron flew here from another

land in search of a plot to fill and warmly
fulfill and mute the Sisyphean rhythm of restless

creatures’ lives, across countless miles
that would never do, just like a plastic bag.

Close up it’s clear the field holds both
a stately heron and a plastic bag, each

studying the other like figure and reflection.
Now the difference is obvious. The heron’s eyes

recognize the predicament he’s in, the infernal
froglessness of all this wiregrass, the length

of the horizon, the lean of a eucalyptus. Behind
his eyes is the continent where he first

leapt into a crystalline gust, and at beak’s end wriggles
a continent uncharted, fleshly, ready to be snapped up

like a young shad. But this time of year his wings
know everything there is to know about south

and nothing else. Whereas the bag simply is
the predicament it’s in and billows

with all the joy that has ever flown through
a thousand years of wind.

By Jon Fischer

It’s hard to describe a drawing of a millennium,
but you know it when you see it

on a sticky note fallen to the speckled tile
near the lockers in a high-school hallway

It’s rendered half of the social commentary
inherent in a peach-colored crayon, half

of ablative carbon fiber and iridium dust,
the artist’s signature a sketch

of the human genome. This millennium is half past,
half future, neither all that great.

The drawing smells like a philosopher’s feet.
It tells a story that rises off the paper

and reads the palms of passersby, turning life lines
jagged and love lines into spirals. It tells a story

that sinks deep inside the paper, seizing
for its fibrous heart the best and most harrowing

plot twists. Nonetheless, the drawing explains
why the Nile changed course, why tornadoes

and the sea found fancier homes,
why we made no new religions

but let the ones we had grow brittle, why we still
lose languages and serenade machines

and can’t be bothered to speak with aliens.
There you are in the middle, anatomically accurate.

Built around you are a cathedral and a labyrinth
then skyscrapers and scaffolding, a rational galaxy,

a fleet of anxieties, ignorance
efflorescent in a waxing tide, and your personal

win-loss record. You do with the drawing
what fine art does to you,

folding it into a Möbius strip for later,
and also for earlier.

By Justin Jannise

The moon, full the night before he died.
The neighbor’s old golden retriever approached the cyclone fence,
               sat and watched the nurses enter and leave,
               turned silver
in moonlight, and howled
                                                        its long, sad howl.

Fourth-of-July gunshots echoed through morning.
The pact I’d made to keep myself at home glued to the phone’s abrupt news
               wavered,
and I allowed a man in
where I vowed no god, after you, would enter.

Your planet in retrograde,
                                                      twisting letters around:

I told Christine how I’d taken to staring at still flies
               on museum websites—
camera light bouncing off the dimpled flesh of a pear,
dotted on long ago by a Renaissance sponge and sprinkle of salt.

I told Emily I’d sent off for a new gun
instead of a new rug

                             —the click of the revolving chamber—

                                             the floor, where I told her I’d keep it,
                                                              opening a tile to reveal a hidden drawer.

Repast at ten this morning, my sister texted,
and then overrode the autocorrect:
                                                                   He past.

He passed. (Erased, the table I’d pictured
               laid out with aluminum dishes, gravy boats,
                              and heirloom pitchers, fogged and full.)

My mother, silent for hours after that.

Me, afraid to call her.

You, who have become lifelike,
               give me a word for the slow death of 70 years of memory,
                              so slow we all got sick
               of watching it rot,

                             watching ourselves flicker from talking dolls
                             into irrecoverable shadow.

He, past.

               Change dead into dear. Change hated into heated.

Give me back the gold I was promised
               when I agreed to try to live
                              as long as promisable.

By Michael Lavers

Sure, Horace, praise the ordinary—
milkweed days, a cow, the crackling
static of the swaying grain. Say yes,
the way the cut hay steams in sun is good,
the way the dahlias bloom in rain.
Say that a hundred shades of dusk
armor the trout, that a pear’s full burden
suits the bough. But when the fire
jumps, or if the fever stays,
when sorrows blacken in the brain
like mold—how could it matter
that some wet grass shone? That grapes
grow sweet? That birches shake in wind,
gilding the new graves with their gold?

By Pichchenda Bao

In college, I helped to paint a mural of the bedroom in Goodnight Moon for a local daycare center. “Oooh, a classic,” everyone said. But for me, it was the first time I had ever encountered that whimsical book. One more thing to add to my running list of things I was missing from my childhood. One more thing that put me slightly out-of-sync with my U.S.-born-and-bred peers.

I would like to insist that my childhood was ordinary and suburban. My parents drove me to violin lessons. I was a youth football cheerleader for a season. By the time I was in elementary school and learning how to read, there was ample food on the table, a house with a backyard, and all the attendant comforts that went with such stability. I spoke English well, and so did my parents. But buried under the getting-on of every day, Cambodia and all we lost there throbbed like an unhealed wound.

Still, I don’t remember Cambodia. I was born out of the aftermath of the Khmer Rouge. When I was a few months old, my mother carried me out of the country. She didn’t have to abandon me, she likes to tell people, because I never cried on the journey. We reunited with my father in the refugee camp completely by chance, and eventually arrived in the U.S. with all our belongings stuffed inside a large plastic bag emblazoned with the logo of the resettlement agency.