The Best American Poetry

Amy Dougher-Solórzano: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

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Still Life with Taylor Ham Sandwich

 

Anything can be an altar.

I skip Easter mass

to sit by the window

in my old bedroom.

(The walls are still pink

but the hospital bed

is new.)

April sun pools

on my father’s chest

& the tray of offerings

beside him:

a mug of coffee,

now cold;

quartered strawberries,

their red juices

seeping lazily

across the plate

toward the English muffin

with Taylor ham

& congealed eggs.

My father snores

& to me it is birdsong.

It reminds me

of an old photo

on my mother’s fridge:

him asleep in a beach chair

in Wildwood Crest:

mouth open,

one earbud dangling loose

like a new species of jellyfish.

Now he sleeps curled

in the nautilus shell

of his own spine,

coral pink bath towel

rolled & tucked

under his bad knee.

I like to imagine

he is being cradled

in the hand of a giant

I can’t see—

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Amy Dougher-Solórzano is a poet originally from Harrison, New Jersey. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Rutgers University-Newark, and a BS in chemical biology from Saint Joseph’s University. She was selected by the Fine Arts Work Center as a 24PearlStreet Scholar for Fall 2024. Her poems have appeared in New England Review and Rattle. She lives in Northern Virginia with her husband Aleck. [“Still Life with Taylor Ham Sandwich” first appeared in New England Review, Volume 46.1 in March 2025.]

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                                    A Sick Man in Bed, a Woman Praying to the Virgin and Child. Oil painting by Du Moulin, 1750.

Jim Daniels: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

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Obedience School

 

Near the end, the experts on loss

sold us a robot dog that barked

and leaned into the touch

 

to give comfort to my blind dying

mother. She wasn’t fooled enough

to name it—or gone enough,

 

though she was pretty gone

then. We put it in her hands

and she stroked it

 

then hurled it across the room.

Nothing to lose is never true.

Always something more to lose.

 

I turned the dog off.

Bad dog, I said.

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Jim Daniels’ most recent collection of poems is Gun/Shy, Wayne State University Press. He has published many collections of fiction; written four produced screenplays; and his collection of essays, An Ignorance of Trees, is forthcoming from Cornerstone Press in 2025. He has edited or co-edited six anthologies, most recently RESPECT: The Poetry of Detroit Music. He is a recipient of two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and two from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. A native of Detroit, he lives in Pittsburgh and currently teaches in the Alma College low-residency MFA Program.

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                                                      Paul Strand, Blind Woman, photogravure, 1912, The J. Paul Getty Museum

Clare Banks: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

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Playing in the Pastoral Dream

 

My neighbor spent the summer destroying

his yard. Lopping the tops of his trees,

and razing the ground until it was no more

than dirt, the roots of vines ascending

 

like wire. I was on the sidewalk

watching my kids ride bikes when his wife

came onto their porch in a bathrobe.

Her head behind the screen was pale and bald

 

from what could only be chemo.

My body seized at the sight of her,

and I thought of my sister last winter

in her wig. It’s no use, I wanted

 

to tell him. There’s no construction,

no revision that will stop this.

In the street it was dusk: I knew about death

and I didn’t. It hardly mattered.

 

The red brush of a cardinal darted

across my yard in the evening’s odd coolness,

moving to her nest in the hedgerow.

Sycamores lining the street shed bark

 

like snakes in wide strokes, leaving their trunks

a pale green. Inside my pastoral dream,

the white noise of cicadas rises

around my son playing in the grass.

 

The street lies awash in golden light

like that of endless spring. And my daughter,

at the end of the block, she’s a deer

wandering the trees, she’s in and out of sight.

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Clare Banks is the author of Notes on Endings, forthcoming from Terrapin Books, and associate editor for Smartish Pace. A recipient of two Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Awards, her poems have appeared in or are forthcoming from Iron Horse, Boulevard, Poet Lore, and Mississippi Review, among others. She was nominated for the Best New Poets 2023 anthology by Mississippi Review, was a 2023 finalist in Radar Poetry's Coniston Prize and a 2024 finalist in Iron Horse Literary Review's National Poetry Month Prize. She has an MFA in poetry from the University of Maryland and lives in Baltimore City where she co-hosts The HOT L Poets Series.

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                                                                                          Vincent van Gogh, The Road Menders, 1889.       
                                                             

 

Ryan Eckes: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

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form

 

filing for unemployment again at the end of teacher appreciation week

along w/ 50 million other people

i almost put an air conditioner in the window backwards, on-switch facing outside

i almost cooled off the whole city

what are you doing, my friend said gently, flying down delaware ave, into the night

i appreciate you, i said, waving goodbye, on my way

back to the form:

were you absent from work when work was available:

no, never

i would never try to love my friends

every single day, skipping stones across the water

for pleasure, one dream after another

why would i ever want life to just get better

and better and better

did you or will you receive vacation pay

the car is parked, the door is locked

the room is empty, the fridge is closed

the day is long, the pain is old

when will you learn

said the carcass of an ATM

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Ryan Eckes is a poet from Philadelphia. He is the author of Wrong Heaven Again, General Motors, Valu-Plus, and Old News. Recent poems have appeared in Prolit, Wax Nine Journal, and Windfall Room. Eckes has worked as an adjunct professor at numerous institutions and as a labor organizer in education.

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                                                       Depression Bread Line by George Segal, 1991, bronze, 108 x 148 x 36

Eneida P. Alcalde: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

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Poetic Justice

 

The poem that needs to be written

            is not white.

 

The poem that needs to be written

            does not speak English.

 

The poem that needs to be written

            does not walk the halls of academia.

 

The poem that needs to be written

            does not seek publication.

 

The poem that needs to be written

            does not need the moon or a prompt.

 

The poem that needs to be written

            bites its hungry tongue in the land of state media.

 

The poem that needs to be written

            throbs in locked boxes hidden from clerics.

 

The poem that needs to be written

            fingers a gun in the rubble of war.

 

The poem that needs to be written

            swallows itself over and over.

 

The poem that needs to be written

            will be killed by the time this is read.

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A Pushcart Prize-nominated writer, Eneida P. Alcalde is the author of The Wealth We Surrendered, forthcoming from Ethel. [“Poetic Justice” first appeared in Poet Lore (Summer/Fall 2024).]

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An ouroboros in a 1478 drawing, from 15th-century Greek scribe Theodoros Pelecanos's manuscript of an alchemical tract attributed to Synesius, a 5th-century Greek bishop.

Michael Earl Craig: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

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Chunk of Sea Glass

 

Becky I’m typing this in your study.

It’s a rainy fall day and for some reason

I want to type “you’re in Japan” and

don’t know where your man and kid are.

Man and kid feels a little crass but

it’s okay because I’ve let myself into

your house and I’m weak, and drunk, and

a little hungry, looking at a sizable chunk

of blue-green sea glass here on your desk,

considering the weight it exerts upon the desk

and the desk’s equal (inverse) force upon its base.

 

A thunderstorm’s just passed through,

I type that. And one of your windows

is cracked slightly—the study sips the balmy

air. The room smells like old books.

There’s a red wig on a wig rack,

a heavy black stapler that feels like a pistol,

a water glass with an inch of water in it.

 

Soon Becky I will recline in your recliner,

your cat sprawled on my abdomen,

making it difficult to nap. But I’ll nap.

And when I wake I’ll still have the house

to myself I am sure. And all the browns

and beiges and burnt mustards of your study

will resume again their quiet work on me,

coaxing me along on my journey without you

(who may or may not be in Japan), your man

or your kid.

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Michael Earl Craig’s most recent (of six) books of poems are Woods and Clouds Interchangeable and Iggy Horse. He has published poems in various magazines, journals, and anthologies—Poetry, The Believer, The New Yorker, and Best American Poetry (2014, 2022) among them. He was Poet Laureate for the State of Montana (2015–17) and a Civitella Ranieri Foundation fellow (2021). He lives near Livingston, Montana, where he shoes horses for a living.    [Author photo by Susan Thomas.]

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                                                  Heinrich Campendonk, Sitzender Mann mit Katze, 1919 .       

 

francine j. harris: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

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Portrait of My Father Mocking Sammy Davis Jr.

 

He widens an eye and gets down on one knee.

He accepts a sliver of silver from my mother and kisses

her behind. He calls her Frank Sinatra. He calls our house

 

the Rat Pack. He steps away from his piano into the kitchen with a carrot

and now he is Nat King Cole. He is singing “Mona Lisa” on a tap

while he holds my mother’s hand. She is the head

 

of Capitol Records. He could do this every day

for 15 minutes. He forever sings to the stalk over jungle plants

buzzing along the windowsill. They go hand over hand

 

in a photo album. His pompadour is tight. He leans out the window crooning.

He hollers at all the little snakes, get back. Now he is bundling up in sweaters.

Now we all eat chocolate pudding. He hates the way we curse.

My father is silvering up his tap shoes. He overdoses on

 

a living room couch. Now, he has a Duke Maestro on a poster.

He’s super funny with a self-demure. In his nod he is Richard Pryor,

bluing in an afro flame. He jokes about his body

on fire. Now, if only he could remember his mother. He crumbles into

 

Sunday morning on stage. Suddenly scatting over oatmeal, now he is

Al Jarreau. We, she, and he take five. We are strumming into stutter

on guitar. But now he is turning over the dark into Miles. He turns his back

 

to my mother’s fading hue. He is blowing holes into living

room walls. His popped lapels are flattening. Flattering

his jacket is leather and Shaft. He sports the Private Eye Duke

 

slumped over. He takes up a shotgun to the neighborhood

in blue. Here he is, the mirage of a sober pimp.

He sends my mother off to the mailbox. One last honey

go get my money. The snow is full of snow and maroon.

 

He is Bryant Gumbel up at sunrise. Keeping his news

tuned to the network. He is high and he can’t stop

smiling. None of his teeth go missing. He is painting his mouth

 

blue and dressing in dresses. My father flips Flip Wilson. No

one will see his second act. The weather is full of beautiful

muppets. My father is Ben Vereen.

 

He tips his bowler, and he lifts the sky.

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francine j. harris is the author of three collections, including Here is the Sweet Hand, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Originally from Detroit, she has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony, and the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. She is Professor of English at the University of Houston and serves as Consulting Faculty Editor at Gulf Coast.

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                                                                       Valentina Bautista, The Rat Pack

 

Spencer Reece: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Ephphatha   

        for Dorothy Moran

 

            When the pandemic hit, the priest

died first. Refrigerator trucks chilled the dead. 

The parish stacked the hymnals in tubs

and St. Mark’s/ San Marcos closed in Queens,

the mocked Simon and Garfunkel borough

where coins in dryers clickety-clicked like clocks

in European town squares.

 

            Seven months later, Roosevelt Avenue

jounces with mango slices in Zip-locks. 

The vestry interviews me.  Last day of August,

no AC, we sweat and fidget with our N95 masks. 

The wardens, Henry and Jorge, jigger

the broken tumbler to unlock the safe. 

“Cut the parish hall in half, don’t fundraise,

leverage the lot. Less people in church,”

says a new bishop from his Zoom-perch.  

 

            A woman stands in the garden.

Forever a woman stands in the garden. 

She rides the 7 to work, is over ninety,

first woman to work on Wall Street. 

Much she won’t tell or only tell me.

My invisible incomprehensible work.

I go where I am sent.

 

            A bloated deacon gossips and picks

at the many pimples on his forehead.

O, buckling blue esotery falling all apart!

My anonymity increases with each entrance.

Will our hope be transfigured by this dust?

My black uniform sticks to my pocked back

like a sealed envelope.

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Spencer Reece is the canon and rector of historic St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Wickford, Rhode Island.  He has published  three books of poetry:  The Clerk's Tale, The Road to Emmaus, and Acts.  In addition, he published The Secret Gospel of Mark: A Poet’s Memoir and All The Beauty Still Left: A Poet’s Painted Book of Hours, watercolors.  He edited Counting Time Like People Count Stars: Poems By The Girls of Our Little Roses. He founded an author series connected to his church called the 14 Gold Street Author Series, in which writers read at the public library and are hosted for a meal at the rectory.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________                           Art Garfunkel, left, and Paul Simon in front of the latter’s childhood home at 137-62 70 Road in Kew Gardens Hills, spring 1975.

Susan Barba: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

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Player Piano

 

My face is a case study

in gravity. A face study. A grave.

Effaced, I introduce myself

by name, a quippy

delegate, ceci Susan,

this lifelong stand-in.

Named after my mother

or rather, the pseudonym that hid

her foreign origin. Shoushik.

She’d take her breakfast

on the balcony. Tehran

1943. Feeding the ants

and plants her onion-tisane

milk. My little mother.

From her ovaries

came I. An alloy.

Reproduction reproduces

inexactly, doesn’t it?

Soldering like to unlike,

an off-rhyme, like me

and time, the clock ticks.

Those aren’t notes but holes

that make the music.

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Susan Barba is the author of two poetry collections, Fair Sun and geode. She is the editor of American Wildflowers: A Literary Field Guide, which won the 2023 American Horticultural Society Book Award. She earned a PhD in comparative literature from Harvard University and works as a senior editor for New York Review Books. [“Player Piano” appeared in the New York Review of Books, 1/16/25.]

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     Golnar Adili (Iranian American),The Organization for Documenting The Mood of The Country, 2013. Printed Japanese paper,hand-stitched thread, batting, canvas. 42 x 60 x 1 inches. Used by permission of the artist.   

Tom Davis: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

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Homage to Helen Maynor Scheirbeck

 

I used to tell the story of how Helen,

when I was so young I hardly knew who I was,

would call us to DC during the effort to get

 the Indian Education Act drafted and passed

and work us until 1 or 2 in the morning

and then get disgusted when, bleary-eyed,

we stopped making sense.

She’d tell us it was obvious we couldn’t concentrate

anymore and might as well go to bed.

Then she would be knocking on our doors at 7:30 a.m.

to make sure we knew our assignments

even though she lived over an hour away.

 

Helen Maynor Scheirbeck  became one of the 20th Century’s

most significant Indian leaders,

showing no fear, and occasionally no sense,

talking her way into a job at the Washington office of Senator Sam Ervin,

getting the Bible- and Constitution-quoting racist,

who helped bring President Richard Nixon down and became a national hero,

to support the only desegregation legislation he ever supported, the Indian Civil Rights Act.

 

She got her fire from her father.

 

In 1957 and 1958, the Ku Klux Klan staged two cross burnings

in the yards of Indians as a threat, and on Saturday nights, sent caravans

of black sedans through Robeson County, home of the Lumbee Indians.

 

Then Klan leader James “Catfish” Cole, fiery radio evangelist,

planned a rally at Hayes Millpond, after promising the Master

of all Klan Masters he would strengthen the Klan in North Carolina.

Fearing armed resistance from the Lumbee community,

local and federal officials tried to persuade Cole to hold the rally elsewhere,

but Cole was a messenger of the Lord.

On the night of January 18, 1958, as Cole began to speak to fifty Klansmen,

after the thousands he’d invited failed to show up, a Lumbee man shot out

the light bulb near Cole’s head, and hundreds of Indians fired weapons into the air.

Klansmen fled into the dark pond and woods.

 

Later Cole was arrested for inciting a riot. 

He appeared before Lacy Maynor, Helen's father,

the sole Indian judge in Robeson County,

and was convicted and sentenced to a year in prison.

 

Lacy Maynor refused to let threats keep him from driving the Klan

from Eastern North Carolina even though Black people were hanged, drowned, burned,

or dragged behind pickup trucks as examples,

and the Klan had decided purity meant purity,

and Indians were not white.

God didn’t like them.

Grand Dragon Catfish Cole said so.

 

And now Judge Maynor, Grand Dragon Catfish Cole,

and even Helen Maynor Scheirbeck are gone.

 

And those of us who remember do not know how to mourn what has passed

since in our mourning we too are passing

through days and events that sweep emotions and thoughts

into the river of individual histories, written and unwritten,

that eventually  flow into the terrible emptiness of loss.

 

Helen would say that none of what she accomplished was done alone,

that she was just a bit player. “A little old Indian grandma

from North Carolina,” she’d call herself.

 

Helen Maynor Scheirbeck died in Maryland in a nursing home—

not famous like she should have been,

her legacy left inside those who knew her.

 

We walk through our days and wonder where time goes.

We walk through our days and grow a past

and remember those who have made a difference in our lives,

who transformed our world in ways that last.

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Thomas Davis has spent his career in education as the President or Chief Academic Officer of five different tribal colleges or universities.  He also was important in the founding of both the College of the Menominee Nation in Wisconsin and the World Indigenous Nations Higher Education Consortium.  He has published two books of poetry, two epic poems, seven novels, and a book of nonfiction.  His literary honors include the Edna Ferber Fiction Award and an Outstanding Achievement in Poetry Award from the Wisconsin Library Association.  He and his wife, Ethel Mortenson Davis, are the proprietors of Four Windows Press and are also the current Poet Laureates in Door County, Wisconsin.  [For more on Helen Scheirbeck, click here.]

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Helen Maynor Scheirbeck (in blue jacket, holding cup) and colleagues at the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian, early aughts.

Stevie Edwards: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Father’s Day

 

I have streamlined gift giving

            with an efficiency the men in my family

would applaud: a digital meat thermometer

            with Bluetooth for all the fathers

in my life—my father, my father-

            in-law, my stepfather-in-law.

My husband does not get one

            because he does not want

to be a father, but we make love

            twice in the same day—

we’re good at it. Making each other

            fuzzy with pleasure. I don’t think

two people could have been happier,

            Virginia Woolf wrote

in her final suicide note. I think he’s afraid

            he is my Leonard, or

I am afraid he finds some joy in it,

            making coffee for a woman

who spends too many mornings

            drowning in her own mind,

missing the thrill of summer

            unfurling outside the window.

I can’t blame him for not believing

            I’d be good at wiping asses

and noses, but lately everything

            mamas me. The dogs say mama

when I fill their bowls, and the hydrangeas

            say mama when I water them,

and my little niece asks whose mama

            I am, because I am the right age

and size for a mama. Toddlers clutch

            at my legs at zoos and breweries

with fenced yards for children to run

            while their parents drink

with friends, with me. It’s selfish,

            but sometimes I look at my love’s

long dark lashes, his high cheekbones,         

            and think—O God, I need more

of him. We could make something

            so beautiful. But we don’t.

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Dr. Stevie Edwards is an Assistant Professor at Clemson University, and poetry editor of The South Carolina Review. Stevie’s poems have appeared in Poetry, American Poetry Review, TriQuarterly, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. They are the author of Quiet Armor (Northwestern University Press, 2023), Sadness Workshop (Button Poetry, 2018), Humanly (Small Doggies Press, 2015), and Good Grief (Write Bloody Publishing, 2012). They hold a PhD from the University of North Texas and an MFA from Cornell University. Originally a Michigander, they now live in South Carolina with their spouse and a small herd of rescue pit bulls. [This poem originally appeared in The Southern Review, summer 2023.]

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                                            Photo by Gisèle Freund of Virginia Woolf and Leonard Sidney Woolf, color print, 1939.

Aaron Smith: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

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Driving North on Interstate 99 the Poet Considers His Life at Forty

 

I’ve pushed all my lovers into winter nights

or fled them in 3 AM taxis, each city empty

as a room I slept in. I understood today

why my mother cries when I leave:

she got nothing she wished for at the driveway’s edge.

I ignored friends, stayed home to type in evening light

that even still makes me suicidal. I haven’t found words

for the gray-smudge sadness under my sternum.

I got everything I wanted and didn’t realize it. I got nothing

I wanted and made excuses. Still I can’t sit in a room

without television noise, or think about the past

without throwing pencils at the ceiling.

I can’t stand to drive in silence.

I can’t stand to drive with the radio on.

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Aaron Smith is the author of five collections of poetry published by the Pitt Poetry Series, most recently Stop Lying (2023). With Maureen Seaton, he co-wrote the forthcoming book Beautiful People (SMU Project Poëtica/Bridwell, 2025). He is associate professor of creative writing at Lesley University in Cambridge, MA.

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                                                                         Paul Richmond, from his War Paint series.                              
                                                

Shelley Wong: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

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When We Were Young

 

I was a month older. We both had

Chinese last names. She was also

 

Khmer, Thai & Vietnamese: a mix

of enemies. Thailand always

 

stealing temples along the border.

She identified as Khmer because

 

they needed her the most.

We were opposites, like our two

 

eventual cats. I was the aloof one,

lithe & nervous in my Audrey

 

Hepburn sunglasses. She was

the teasing one, smoking cloves

 

slouched in her brother’s frayed

skater clothes, seemingly

 

carefree. After high school, we lived

in New York City, met every

 

Gen X Khmer person in the New England

& Tri-State Area. I shredded papaya,

 

marveled at ahmok. Dancing

at banquets, I flared my fingers

 

like gladiolas opening. Like our elders,

our leisure included free Atlantic City

 

hotel rooms & touring the buffets. She’d blow

through a snapped snow crab leg

 

& split it cleanly, giving me a perfect

piece of meat. Spoiled, she called me

 

against the casino chimes. Her mother called

me oun—daughter. Growing up, she didn’t

 

know which stories about Cambodia

were true. She could sweet talk

 

anybody, especially a security guard.

Four generations deep in America,

 

I was more afraid. Chinese waiters

were confused when she spoke

 

instead of me. I was the light-skinned

tall girl with a blank face, the one who

 

paid the bill & didn’t suck the bones clean.

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Shelley Wong is the author of As She Appears (2022), longlisted for the National Book Award and winner of a Lambda Literary Award. She lives in San Francisco.

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                                                                    Tamara de Lempicka, The Girls, ca.1930, oil on canvas.

Al Basile: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

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Killers Before Breakfast

                                    New York City, 1974

It was the morning after. On the night

before, we'd played at Max's Kansas City,

with Stevie Wonder sitting in the house,

and Johnny Winter joining later. They

 

had come for Bobby Bland, for whom we opened,

but they heard our set. The room was small,

not deep, and we could see the audience.

When you really get them – you can tell.

 

For once we weren't driving overnight,

so we stayed up and crashed in the hotel,

and it was early, much too early, when

a few of us went out to find some breakfast.

 

We dragged ourselves into the elevator:

Duke in his fedora, Rich with locks

flowing long below his pork-pie hat,

as if Lester Young were Wild Bill Hickok.

 

John had his wig, and I just had my hair,

but motionless, eyes slitted against morning,

we four leaned back like tilted packing crates

against the back wall of the empty car.

 

We crawled down a few floors; came to a stop.

The doors slid open, and a woman peered

in at us and blanched, and paused; then, eyes

big with alarm, she stepped into our space.

 

She stood at the side wall, by the door,

and clutched a shopping bag, a kerchief on

her head, tensely alert, fully awake.

We made no remark. Our ride resumed.

 

After three more floors, she broke the silence.

“Please don't kill me,” she said. We assured her

we were just musicians who'd stayed up

and hadn't slept much, and we needed coffee.

 

This seemed to calm her down, and we descended.

Before the doors could open on the lobby,

solemn, plain, she spoke once more: “I have

to tell the truth. You look like murderers.”

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Poet/playwright, singer/songwriter, and cornet player, Al Basile is known to blues fans world-wide, with 20 solo albums and 8 nominations for Blues Music Awards. He has three books of poetry (the most recent is 2021's Solos, from Antrim House) and five verse audio plays (his 2021-22 plays Hill&Dale and Open Question won gold and platinum awards from the HEARnow national audio drama festival). He is a member of the Powow River poets and is the host of the online poets-in-conversation show Poems On. 

To hear Al Basile reading “Killers before Breakfast,” click

Killers Before Breakfast - Al Basile

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                                                                               Max's Kansas City, 1970s

January Gill O’Neil: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

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Manifesto

 

You can’t eat your cake and have it, too, says my boyfriend

and Ted Kaczynski, turning cliches into bombs. My boyfriend

who is not the Unabomber loves me from 1,300 miles away.

We dream over the phone, count the days until our next visit.

At Whole Foods before Valentine’s Day, I buy a red velvet cake

I’ll eat alone. A man walks out with a double dozen red roses

wrapped in cellophane. I miss my boyfriend. Can I eat my cake

and have it, too? Transposed verbs are what got Kaczynski caught—

his use of language, his arcane mind, but he wasn’t wrong.

What good is having a cake if you can’t eat it? That clumsy

phrase comes straight out of Middle English, straight from

my valentine’s red mouth. He long-distance laughs as I puzzle

the meaning but isn’t that the point? Love is a kind of syntax,

a soft rhyme, prison time. I’m eating my cake and having it, too.

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January Gill O'Neil is an associate professor at Salem State University and the author of Glitter Road (2024), Rewilding (2018), Misery Islands (2014), and Underlife (2009), all published by CavanKerry Press. Glitter Road was a finalist for the 2024 New England Book Award. From 2012-2018, she served as the executive director of the Massachusetts Poetry Festival. The recipient of fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, Cave Canem, and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, O'Neil was the 2019-2020 John and Renée Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi, Oxford. She currently serves as the 2022-2025 board chair of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP).  [Author photo by John Andrews.]

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Jack Ridl: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

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It’s Often Time to Feed the Birds

 

The ornaments are still on the tree.

     We’re still playing Irish carols.

          And damned be anyone who says

 

our sweetness of feeling is excessive or false.

      Jim Harrison is smiling and fiercely

          reminding it’s better to live as

 

a sentimentalist than to die a smart ass.

      I was at the back window watching

          our dog, my wife, and our daughter,

 

the dog bounding into the wind-drifted

     snow as they, bundled and laughing,

           trudged their way to the front door.

 

It’s a new year. But is there such a thing?

      The sun sets, rises, sets, and we name

            the days that tumble one into

 

another while 500 million light years away

       lies a galaxy with suns that have no

             days, no war, no need for a manger.

 

Here we must waken, roll away the stone

       from our empty tomb of sleep, step

              through another sunlit tragic day, trying

 

to believe in the snowplow, the mail,

       the hello from the next-door neighbor, the mourning

              doves fluffed at the nearly empty feeder.

                                                                       for Dan Gerber

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Jack Ridl has published eight collections, the latest being All at Once (CavanKerry Press, which also published his Losing Season). Wayne State University Press published his Saint Peter and the Goldfinch, Practicing to Walk Like a Heron, which received the ForeWords Review Gold Medal for poetry, and Broken Symmetry, named the year’s best book of poetry by The Society of Midland Authors. Billy Collins, Poet Laureate at the time, chose Ridl’s Against Elegies for the NYC Center for Book Arts Award. Ridl is co-author with Peter Schakel of Approaching Literature and co-editor of 250 Poems, both from Bedford/St. Martin’s. The Carnegie Foundation named him Michigan’s Professor of the Year. More than 80 of his students have earned their MFA in poetry, and more than 100 are publishing, several having won first book awards. Jack Ridl’s weekly YouTube program “The Sentimentalist” centers on everyday, non-newsworthy subjects, each program ending with a poem.  

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                                               Jim Harrison in 1972. Photograph from CSU Archives Everett

Andréa Ferrell Gannon: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

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Olympia

            after Édouard Manet (1863-65)

 

Ignore them. You look as if coming

from or stepping toward pleasure.

Quelle scandale. I want to be that,

goddess, Olympia, atop a divine mound

of flowers strewn. Very clever, Manet,

his Irish haired siren as oily mythology.

They think they know you but forget

they pay to quench their thirst for you.

You must be used to people pampering you.

The critics and crowds are shocked. Do

you dare return a stare? But how little

they know. You whore. Your allures,

your back-tired maid, your unfinished canvas,

you’re blasé about that massive bouquet of flowers,

just another pink shower of petals; it happens

every day since turning thirteen. Consider

the chapter left in your roman à clef, then

an outing with your sister, a passé pussycat,

an overblown choker, that obvious orchid

in your ear. Critics diminish your esprit,

the audacity of a ripened body—packaged

by perception. This moment chosen

for subjugation, a slice of servants and

dreams, he wills the world to view.

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Andréa Ferrell Gannon is a memoirist-poet, native Californian, daughter of an immigrant mother and Lakota father. Find her now or soon in The Washington Post, The Coachella Review, GRXL, Kelp, Cricket, and Poet Lore.

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                                                                          Édouard Manet, Olympia, 1863, Musée d’Orsay.               

 

Ariel Francisco: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

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Seeing a UFO and Singing Frank Sinatra’s “Fly Me to the Moon” 

into the Night at the Top of My Lungs

 

How many poems does a guy have to write

to get abducted by aliens? I know you

see me, same as the fat moon peeping

through the trees like a pervert. I just

want to talk. My arms are sore from waving.

My dad used to wonder why I was always

so fascinated with space, then learned

I share a birthday with Yuri Gagarin

and that explained everything. I would

watch that shit show Ancient Aliens

with my mom and she would say

you know in Guate we remember

where the Mayas came from, raising

her eyebrows into orbit.

How could I not grow up to search

the skies for meaning? Ancient peoples

thought objects soaring through the atmosphere

were celestial serpents, their glowing tails

slithering through space, and I buy it.

Quetzalcoatl, is that you? I feel

like the last kid sitting in front of the school

waiting to be picked up. Don’t say

you’ve forgotten about me.

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Ariel Francisco is the author of four full-length poetry collections, most recently All the Places We Love Have Been Left in Ruins (Burrow Press, 2024), and the translator of various poetry collections from Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, and Haiti. Born in the Bronx to Dominican and Guatemalan parents and raised in Miami, his work has been published in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, Academy of American Poets, POETRY Magazine, The New York City Ballet, Latino Book Review, and elsewhere. He is Assistant Professor of Poetry and Hispanic Studies at Louisiana State University.

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                                                    Steve Kaufman, Frank Sinatra Singing "Somewhere over the Rainbow."

Emma Bolden: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

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My Mother Says There’s Beauty Even in the Midst of Loss

 

but I am no longer listening, I am no longer looking

out of the car window & into the outside & all

its flowers, cheap party favors stacked up at the funeral

 

that the world is. As if a violet were God’s sign

that pain will be worth it someday. As if

on that someday God will make it all worthwhile,

 

living in a world where worth is based on pain.

If I could make the trees listen. If I could make them

understand, make them throw down their leaves & raise

 

arms bare as any human agony to the sky where

my mother says God is, where God stuffs his pockets

with our prayers like he’s hoarding candy, where sometimes

 

he unwraps a wish & decides that his answer is no.

It hurts me more than it makes me angry, the trees’

insistence on green. And after all beauty is nothing

 

like reason, nothing like a reason to believe the things we cannot

change are the things we have to accept. My mother drives,

the car moves over the asphalt some city put down to pave a way,

 

to roll its people forward despite what the ground had to say,

& above the sky gathers its blues like the face of a boy

refusing to breathe until he gets his way.

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Emma Bolden is the author of a memoir, The Tiger and the Cage (Soft Skull Press), and the poetry collections House Is an Enigma (Southeast Missouri State University Press), medi(t)ations (Noctuary Press), and Maleficae (GenPop Books). The recipient of a Creative Writing Fellowship from the NEA, her work has appeared in The Norton Introduction to Literature, The Best American Poetry, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and such journals as Ploughshares, The Gettysburg Review, Pleiades, Prairie Schooner, the Bennington Review, and Shenandoah. She currently serves as an editor of Screen Door Review.

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                                                         The Wizard tree, Cathedral Woods, Intervale, N.H. 1900.

John Koethe: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

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The Divinity WithinPrevious Post

Sometimes I write to try to figure something out

I hadn't understood before, that somebody else has said.

I've no idea what "the divinity within" might mean,

And yet I've heard it said so often that it must mean something

Everyone recognizes, whether they know what it really means or not.

It could mean we're created in God's image, if there were one,

Though I think it makes more sense the other way around,

Which is what I hope that Emerson and my mother had in mind.

It's not just that the supernatural makes no sense, and that the world

Is real enough without it. It's that each ordinary life seems at the same time

So miraculous it has to be divine, whatever that divinity might be.

 

Why do we think we're something other than we are? Look at the stars,

Or else don't bother, since there's nothing there to see. You realize

They're there, and yet you can't imagine what the worlds that they sustain

Could be like, or if those worlds exist, though there must be billions of them.

How could those lives be anything like ours, with its private sense of time

And memories that speak to me alone, like Sally's hair? Of course the inability

To feel them doesn't mean they can't be real, but what does real even mean 

When it's applied to things we can't begin to understand? I understand this life,

At least I think I do. But how can a life that doesn't have this sense of self

Or the past or poetry, even if it's written in the stars, be one that speaks to me?

 

Perhaps instead of being part of something too immense to understand

Or inhabiting an expanding multiverse in which every possibility is realized

And equally real, each person's life might be in some sense all there is,

Whatever that might mean. I know it sounds absurd, but it isn't any more

Ridiculous than all those narratives of God I grew up trying to believe.

What makes a life divine isn't its perfection or its power, but its estrangement

From the world and the reflection of itself in all it sees. I wish I understood

What people mean by an eternal life. I only know that mine is singular,

Complete and coextensive with the transitory universe that it contains---

As though it were like God's and comprehended everything, but small.

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John Koethe's most recent books are Beyond Belief and Walking Backwards: Poems 1966–2016, both from Farrar, Straus and Giroux; and Thought and Poetry: Essays on Romanticism, Subjectivity, and Truth (Bloomsbury).  “The Divinity Within” will be included in a new book, Cemeteries and Galaxies, to be published by FSG in April, 2025. [Author photo by Tom Bamberger.]

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                                                                              William Blake, Albion Rose, ca 1794

 

Mary Jo Bang: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

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A Film in Which I Play Everyone

 

In scene two, silence is a sleeve, I’m an arm in it.

In an outdated Hollywood magazine, I found a photo

 

of someone wearing my hair. How can that be?

Now I can’t stop thinking about the synaptic sparks

 

over which no one has any control. Or, they have some

control but not enough to count on in a crisis.

 

I’m making sense all the time of all the senseless endings.

A day is as long as the time it takes

 

for the mind to consider life and death countless times.

Which must make a day plus a night a highway

 

we’re only vaguely aware of since we’re busy

sitting in a chair or lying on a bed

 

with a floral-print bedspread or walking to the store

past someone with a dog on a leash and a phone

 

in their hand, into which they seem to be saying,

“That is not what I meant blah, blah, blah”

 

to an absent ear. Home, you unpack the items

you bought, crease the bags flat, stack them out of sight.

 

All without saying a word. This is a non-speaking part.

You’re an extra. That day you were filmed

 

on the steps walking into the school dance,

the costume you wore was pure you.

 

The set for the scene where everyone disappears

was painted Parisian sky-blue. The air burned

 

like a curtain on fire. The fire kept going out,

then being relit, a trick candle on a cake made of clouds.

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Mary Jo Bang is the author of nine books of poems, including A Film in Which I Play Everyone, A Doll for Throwing, and Elegy, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award. She has published translations of Dante’s Inferno, illustrated by Henrik Drescher, and Purgatorio. Paradiso is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in 2025. She is also the translator of Colonies of Paradise by Matthias Göritz, and co-translator, with Yuki Tanaka, of A Kiss for the Absolute: Selected Poems of Shuzo Takiguchi, forthcoming from Princeton University Press in November 2024. She’s been the recipient of a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, and a Berlin Prize Fellowship from the American Academy in Berlin. She teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.  [Author photo by Carly Ann Faye]

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    Dorothea Tanning, Self-Portrait, 1944, oil on canvas. [This is the cover image for Mary Jo Bang's book, A Film in Which I Play Everyone.]