Dedication for a Plot of Ground

November 29, 2025.Reading time 2 minutes.

after William Carlos Williams

By Matthew Williams

This plot of ground facing the gaze
of unrelenting California sun
is dedicated to the living presence of
Charlotte Elizabeth Williams
who laid down in South Carolina,
before boycotted busses with a son
still in her stomach, was forced to move
with her husband and children to Hawaii,
lost that husband to Vietnam, flew
back across the Pacific with her sons
to become the second black family
in a Sacramento suburb, surviving
a stalker who stabbed her seventeen times
and scarred the hands she used to drag
the abusive second husband onto the lawn,
pull the knife from his back, defend from him
the family who, on her single salary, she ensured
saw plays, ballets, foreign shores, afforded new clothes
for new schools—knowing enough of the old school
to keep five black boys from trouble, to fight
against the expectations of pale neighbors,
against the recklessness of their youth,
against driving I-80 ninety miles an hour
and the dour white face that sounds the siren.

She often spoke of God, prayed daily,
became a Senior Olympian as if to hint
at a dignity deities and mountains alone
can achieve, and in her final days
attained a holiness we can only call
human, as her body was still here,
when she began traveling
in that other world, and—

if you can bring nothing
to where she sleeps
but your body, rotten
with its easy living,
keep out.

Thinking About My Father’s Erector Set from 1948

March 3, 2025.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Jen Siraganian

Rarely, my father speaks of the slow rubble piling,
before months sped hotter than his parents expected.
They thought it would pass, unaware of what aches
appear later. He was eight. This was before
walls, checkpoints, talk of two states.

Let’s focus on one wound at a time. I can only tell
a story diluted. I’ll try more softly—my father had toys,
then he didn’t. He had a childhood, then he didn’t.

Here is me at a sunlit kitchen table in California,
doubling as American and something like coarse salt.

How often I hear “it’s complicated” when I mention
my father grew up in Palestine, went to school in Palestine,
immigrated to the U.S. as a Palestinian refugee.

His voicemail last week—don’t post anything online.

For years, he lived in no-man’s-land, and I,
half-Armenian, half-daughter of a man
from half of a land that is half of me.

When I visited, could I call the wall beautiful, but only
the painted side? My grandmother’s friend spit on
for shopping on the wrong street in Jerusalem.
Jews walk on one, Muslims the other.
She’s neither. I started paying a man to do the errands.

Seeing my father’s childhood home, its walls
adorned with sniper fire and a gravity of collisions.
It consumed me, bullet holes as common as commas.

In the Armenian Quarter, the pottery store owner
said he would close before things worsened.
Palestine his home, until it wasn’t. Truths stitched
into my grandmother’s embroidery. Did I tell you
she left that too? Here is an echo no one asked for,
singing of a home in Jerusalem before Armenians evaporated.

At the airport, I, though not yet vapor,
say nothing to the Israeli passport agent.
Not telling him I visited Palestine. Not asking
for the return of the toys my father left behind

Relics

July 17, 2024.Reading time 2 minutes.

By John Bargowski

It was only a steak knife their mother screamed at the cops
after Jimmy stabbed his twin who’d crawled into the hallway

from the apartment across from ours. I thought Joey was going
to die there, bleeding from the gut on the top step of the flight.

A few years older, they treated me like a kid brother, but led
a gang who stole freight from the Erie Lackawanna yard,

so the cops wanted to cuff both and take them downtown to book
and lock up. The judge gave the brothers a choice, so they enlisted

and were shipped off to the green hell we watched every night
on the news. Their mother, heart-ruined, moved away,

and we never heard from any of them again. Years later I walked
The Wall in DC, thinking about justice and what it takes to be a man

in America as I read down the names of the lost hoping to find
neither brother cut into the polished face of that sacred black granite,

unable to forget what brother could do to brother, how a boy’s blood
seeped into the grain of a worn marble step and left a stain

neighbors gathered around, like those bloody chips of martyr bone
we bowed and genuflected before on the holiest days.

Jetson Whirr

November 30, 2021.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Louise Robertson

The Prius should make a noise
as it creeps behind school children
scattering across the road,
sunlight and leaf shadows waving
around them.
It should be, as one petition
suggested to Toyota,
the sound of the Jetson car,
a whirr and a dapple of a sound.
But Toyota has done nothing — nothing.
The cars glide out each year,
shark silent.

When I was 11, at the school trip to Kings Dominion,
standing next to a plastic statue of George,
Maria Framingham declared she
had lost a $10 bill and so of course I checked my back pocket
and of course my $10 bill slipped out. Maria
picked it up and said she found her
$10 and I made no sound
and slunk away, my inner petitioner
demanding, “Hey, make a noise!”
And my inner Toyota doing nothing — nothing.

Another Refugee Poem

November 15, 2020.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Pichchenda Bao

This poem has already been written.
The nausea, familiar.
You’ve been left, bobbing
bereft, in water, watching
flames eat home and hearth.
Or vicariously felt
that dread suck of time
elongating the slim barrel of a gun.
You’ve picked your steps
through a landscape of corpses,
fumbled through each level of grief.
This poem, your companion.

But who will read this poem?
Not the ones with the guns.
Nor the ones cheering them on
or silently assenting
to their menace.
Not even the ones who are carrying
their children away from their fears
toward your fears
of what you know
about this country.
This poem does not
traffic in saviors.

Mango Languages

October 22, 2020.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Linda Bamber

Featured Art: Still Life with Birds and Fruit by Giovanna Garzoni

—For Chris Bullock (in memoriam) and Carolyn Bernstein

In that world people are not discussing The End of the American Experiment.

Yo soy de los Estados Unidos. ¿De dónde es usted?
(I am from the United States. Where are you from?)

In that world people are not in a rage at their relatives for voting wrong and sticking to it.

The Dock Hand

December 13, 2019.Reading time 1 minute.

By Kathryn Merwin

this is a poem about losing things.

not a poem

for the boys who barreled their broken

bodies into the lightningwalls

of my body. for the knife

of let me

in, baby, the trigger-finger

of let’s

go back to my place, just one drink.

you, draining the blue

from my veins, dyeing

empty sheets of skin,

blue again, purple,

blue. the color

of healing of bloodpool

beneath skin. for the crushed

powder in my jack & coke of

no one will ever believe you.

you’ll spend the summer in alaska

and we’ll both pretend

like we’re not losing

something.

you have no idea

what i’m gonna do to you.

yes, I do.

Lucky

January 29, 2019.Reading time 1 minute.

By Steven Dawson

Featured Art: Firer by Felicity Gunn

The first time I watched Braveheart
was in the basement of Lucky’s dope house.
I remember the soft cone of light

reaching out from that small box TV
as if asking for spare change from the dark
and how that little glass frame made

blue-faced Wallace look so much
like an action figure (back when Mel
was somebody’s idea of a hero).

And in the downstairs bathroom hung
a cage with Lucky’s bird, a gray parrot
he took from a woman who couldn’t

pay him and that bird would pull
every dull feather from its back
and curse in Spanish as I watched.

I was nine or ten and alone with Braveheart,
that bird, and basement boxes I imagined filled
with a life before Lucky, when his name

might have been Greg or Brandon or even Mel.
This is how my brother babysat—
upstairs and horizontal with a needle

sleeping in his bowtied arm
like some guardian angel taking
work naps among hallway sleeping bags

swollen with strangers
practicing how to be dead
and Lucky’s bird downstairs

screaming chinga tu madre.

Big Media

May 29, 2015.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Kevin Prufer

Just a glass of water for me, thank you.
One ice cube. Thanks. Just one.
But you should order what you want. Don’t be shy.
And don’t worry about me. Water is all I eat.
That ribeye looks promising, doesn’t it?
The charcuterie platter? The bay shrimp in a nest of deconstructed kale,
     drizzled with truffle oil?
Get what you want and I’ll watch you eat, sipping from my glass of water
like a brilliant bird whose plumage once adorned ladies’ hats, but is now
     available only on the black market,
please don’t mind me.
Did you read about how they beheaded another captured soldier?
Cut his head right off, clean as you like. I know, it’s
terrible. Awful, really. It ought to be a crime,
but the water flushes me out, gives me an inner clean. A kind of peace.
All this war must have been hard on you, the bodies and IEDs and the
     threatening
music. It certainly was hard on our nation, and we weren’t even
there. Broccolini, yes. That’s for him. And the foie gras on toast with foraged
     mushroom and lemon foam,
he’ll take that. I love the look of those cauliflower florets, like petite puffs of
     smoke!
The raviolini afloat in broth like misfired paratroopers!
You’re sweet, but much too thin. You should eat.
They’ll send you back and you’ll be nothing but bones
beneath skin. Did you see how they sliced his head right off?
What do you think of my hat?

Embarrassment: from baraço (halter)

October 4, 2014.Reading time 4 minutes.

By Jennifer Perrine

Selected as runner-up for the 2014 New Ohio Review Poetry Contest by Alan Shapiro

All he found when he came looking for us was the home my mother wanted to leave behind: newspapers stacked knee-deep in the hallways, every corner redolent of cat piss, linoleum caked with dried mud and dust, tangles of hair matted to the tub, dried scabs of meals coating plates and bowls piled high in the sink, on counters. Everywhere: the stink, the rot and mold, the great heaps of unwashed clothes, all the filth my mother never let anyone see. No friends allowed inside. Even her dates didn’t get in the door. She spent her nights at their dubious dens, leaving me alone to toss hamburger wrappers and soda cups on the living room floor, our one trashcan so full I couldn’t empty it. My father, finding all this mess, assumed the worst, took photos, jotted notes, thinking the house had been ransacked, that we’d been robbed, killed or kidnapped, though police assured him there were no signs of struggle. How she’d let the house go, he couldn’t imagine. Before the divorce, I heard her shout: I’m no one’s maid. Years later, when my father asks how we lived in such squalor, I tell him I never noticed at the time, though once I did: My best friend, Heather, and I were playing outside when a sudden shower drove us to huddle under the eaves. Soaked, I took pity, opened the door, disobeying my mother’s one rule. Inside, Heather didn’t ask questions about the mildew, the crumpled paper bags she had to brush aside to sit. She refused the towel I handed her to undo the work of the rain. I saw it then: tatty, gray, stained. Heather left, and later, when my mother found the couch still wet, I told the truth. Her face flushed; I tried to bolt. She reined me in with one hand, unfastened her belt. If they see this, they’ll take you from me, she screamed through the volley of blows. My back grew a rope of welts. They’ll call me unfit. Is that what you want? I tell my father none of this, judge it best not to show him the last bits of how his ex fell apart once they were unhitched. I don’t say how I, too, was the mess, tether she yearned to slip, so she could careen unimpeded through life, how I held tight as she zoomed away, raced toward a place where she’d be no one’s mother, no one’s wife.

Saying Goodbye to Dad

September 27, 2011.Reading time 5 minutes.

by Kate Fetherston

Feature image: Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Near the Lake, 1879-1880. The Art Institute of Chicago.

My dad died alone in a VA hospital
as July sun beat without mercy into the raw

seesaw of breath busting seams between
each cell. Third spacing doctors call it

when cell walls no longer sustain
boundaries with integrity, fluid

sluices into interstitial no-man’s
land and overpowers whatever little

plans were made for a garden and some
trees. When my brothers and I got

the news and flew in from the various
places to which we’d fled, I’d just split

on my first lover after years of her
threatened suicide, bouts of drunken

depression, and refusals to take
her medicine too numerous

to recount. Her view: I’d been trained
strictly for fixer-uppers, too stupid

or stubborn to leave, but, waxing
romantic, she’d croon, “You’ll do me

for a rough old mate.” The day she smashed
my stuff into the carpet and poured

ten pounds of flour over
everything, I might have stayed for

more of the same, but I threw
crumpled clothing into my pack,

startled when she whispered, “I’m
just like your crazy

old man, aren’t I?” I didn’t
answer because we both knew