The Best American Poetry

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

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The Divinity Within

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.]

Angelo Verga: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

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My Father Loves Me, He Loves Me,

He Gets Down on His Knees and Hugs Me

 

My father hugs me, and sweats

we go down one step

           at a time

face to face, neck to neck

 

My hands under his arms

my left foot

            then my right foot down

my face rests on his chest

then his right leg drifts, descends

the foot hesitant, his face clenched

 

A long rest, and then, his left floats

joins its best friend and

             his face softens, less tense

 

One step of the twelve-step staircase done

 

Five minutes later we’ve bottomed

            This is fun, I say

We look gay, he frowns, out of breath

 

and we both laugh, till his eyes grow wet

 

The two doors, inner and outer

are easier, but slow

 

Outside we try another dance

he holds the banister with one hand

my shoulder with his other

I have one hand halfway

           around his titanic belly

and the other free, if he

should begin to let go or fall

 

The car in the driveway with its small

unlocked door seems far away

 

How am I going to get in? he asks

Ass first; then one leg at a time

And slow, slow, dad, we’ve got no deadline

Eleven o ‘clock, he corrects

The doctor can’t start without us, pop, no sweat

 

But I am wrong, his shirt is drenched wet,

His thin hair matted, and flat

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Angelo Verga’s work, which has appeared in more than 150 poetry publications, has been widely anthologized and translated into a dozen languages. His seventh and most recent book is Long & Short, including “The Street in Your Head” (2016). He was an owner of The Cornelia Street Café in Greenwich Village, where his literary programs (1997–2015) provided a home for poets and audiences alike. He is currently a resident of Harlem, NYC, USA.

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                                                              M. C. Escher, Relativity, lithograph, first printed in December 1953.

Rick Barot: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

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A Poem as Long as California

 

 This is my pastoral: the used car lot

where someone read Song of Myself over the loudspeaker

 

all that afternoon, to customers who walked among the cars

mostly absent to what they heard,

 

except for the one or two who looked up

into the air, as though they recognized the reckless phrases

 

hovering there with the colored streamers,

their faces suddenly loose with a dreamy attention.

 

This is also my pastoral: once a week,

in the apartment above, the prayer group that would chant

 

for a sustained hour.  I never saw them,

I didn’t know the words they sang, but I could feel

 

my breath running heavy or light

as the hour’s abstract narrative unfolded, rising and falling

 

like cicadas, sometimes changing in abrupt

turns of speed, as though a new cantor had taken the lead.

 

And this, too, is my pastoral: reading in my car

in the supermarket parking lot, reading the Spicer poem

 

where he wants to write a poem as long

as California.  It was cold in the car, then it was too dark.

 

Why had I been so forlorn, when there was so much

just beyond, leaning into life?  Even the cart

 

humped on a concrete island, the left-behind grapefruit

in the basket like a lost green sun.

 

And this is my pastoral: reading again and again

the paragraph in the novel by DeLillo where the family eats

 

the take-out fried chicken in their car,

not talking, trading the parts of the meal among themselves

 

in a primal choreography, a softly single consciousness,

while outside, everything stumbled apart,

 

the grim world pastoralizing their heavy coats,

the car’s windows, their breath and hands, the grease.

 

If, by pastoral, we mean a kind of peace,

this is my pastoral: walking up Grand Avenue, down 6th

 

Avenue, up Charing Cross Road, down Canal,

then up Valencia, all the way back to Agua Dulce Street,

 

the street of my childhood, terrifying with roaring trucks

and stray dogs, but whose cold sweetness

 

flowed night and day from the artesian well at the corner,

where the poor got their water.  And this is

 

also my pastoral: in 1502, when Albrecht Dürer painted

the young hare, he painted into its eye

 

the window of his studio.  The hare is the color

of a winter meadow, brown and gold, each strand of fur

 

like a slip of grass holding an exact amount

of the season’s voltage.  And the window within the eye,

 

which you don’t see until you see, is white as a winter sky,

though you know it is joy that is held there.

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Rick Barot’s most recent book of poems is Moving the Bones, published by Milkweed Editions in 2024.  His previous collection, The Galleons, was longlisted for the National Book Award.  He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Stanford University.  He lives in Tacoma, Washington and directs The Rainier Writing Workshop, the low-residency MFA program in creative writing at Pacific Lutheran University. [Author photo by Rachel McCauley.}

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Jack Spicer, second from left, with members of the staff of the Poetry Center at San Francisco State College in 1957: Ida Hodes, Ruth Witt-Diamant, and Robert Duncan. Photo by Harry Redl. 

Remembering James Liddy [by Terence Winch]

Today, on the 16^th anniversary of his death, I am thinking of my dear friend James Liddy. He was born and raised in Ireland (though his mother was born in New York), but spent much of his adult life as an English professor at The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. We first made each other’s acquaintance via the USPS in 1973, and corresponded frequently thereafter until his death on 5 November 2008. We were fans of each other’s work—I wrote the entry on James for The Dictionary of Irish Literature and he wrote one on me for The Encyclopedia of the Irish in America.  Below is a short piece on his work that I wrote for a festschrift  called Honeysuckle, Honeyjuice: A Tribute to James Liddy (ed. Michael S. Begnal, Galway, Ireland: Arlen House, 2006).

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James Liddy: Real Ideas from Living

There is no turning in the widening gyre, no sailing to Byzantium (except by allusion), no digging metaphors out of the Ulster bog.  That’s not what goes on in James Liddy’s universe.  Nor is the language he has invented a close relation to that of the stately anthology pieces of the Yeatsian-Heaneyan Irish mainstream.  Liddy is cruising along in a very different vessel, one full of leaks and misdirection, but often making for a more exciting ride.

One reason for this is that James Liddy is the most American of Irish poets, his work clearly freed from worry about his place in the limited-membership ranks of the Irish Literary Establishment.  There is a liberating, off-handed abandon to his poems, much more Whitman than WBY.  But he is also funny (“I Hear the Wife of the Governor of Wisconsin Singing”) and in this way is more like New York School (O’Hara, Ashbery, Ted Berrigan) than anything found in the self-mythologizing of Yeats, the sincere expansiveness of Whitman, or the authoritative meaningfulness of Heaney.  In some ways, Liddy is a closer relative to Oscar Wilde (“I want to find the Wildeness of everything”) and Allen Ginsberg (“Ginsberg bestowed liberation”) than he is even to Jack Spicer or Paddy Kavanagh.  Pleasure, most often an extract of sex or alcohol, is always near at hand in his poems.  The language shortcuts to the action, whether sexual, aesthetic, or spiritual.         

Many of his poems are letters to friends, as many of his letters to friends are poems.  He can’t seem to help himself:

      I am in the waves of drink and love and drowning:

      I wish the first stayed in the ocean the second in Ireland

      and the last in Arcadia.  The last is driving me to the others,

      not for so long in my recorded history has this weary indoors heart been

      so massaged.

            [letter dated December 19, 1978]

 

      You’ll be glad to know that my soul is being

      looked after.  I have discovered a huge church, across

      the river, in a neighborhood of small taverns and

      stores.  It’s Polish, it has Polish services, Polish

      confession.  But every Saturday at 9:30 it has Latin

      Mass.  But there’s always a problem for a Christian.

      The Saturday bars close at 3:30 a.m.  Not enough

      Time for the Lord’s grace to enter and settle in me.

      After the soul the body.

                        [letter, March 1978]

“Or there is a poetry,” Liddy writes in another letter (“Open Letter to the Young About Patrick Kavanagh”), “in which real ideas from living come at us.  This kind can be a direct statement with a reference behind to the story of what happened to the poet.  It relies on the mind staying alive, on the man making the statement keeping his emotional intelligence alive.”  

Direct but mysterious statements that seem to contain a world of reference behind them: this quality pervades A Munster Song of Love and War, the extraordinary chapbook published by White Rabbit in 1971.  I came upon it in a bookstore in Boston in 1973 and was transfixed:

      He’d be alive today if he wasn’t pretty

      He was gorgeous.

      His beauty overcame his enemies and the

                        enemies of Ireland

                        and it was jealousy

                        of his prettiness

                        that has lain him

      On the floor with his head open.

      There are not enough mirrors in the bath

      Rooms of Munster to shout how nice looking

                        he was and awkward

                        with a gun.

This was my first encounter with James’s work, and I was deeply impressed that an Irish poet could be using language in such uninhibited, erotic, and anti-academic ways.  Earlier, he had exhorted Irish poets to “park the paraphernalia out in the sunlight/ Do not let it into the poem.” 

I also like that in Liddy’s paraphernalia-free poems, “The characters keep weeping to the accordion.”  “The accordion doesn’t lie,” we learn elsewhere.  Finally, the box, that ascendant instrument in which so much Irish music finds surprising and subtle expression, has an advocate:

      Praying that God becomes tender enough

      to take up his gold squeeze box

      and play a set with the new arrival

      who has no need for purification

      because tunes are receipts for existence

      and an Irishman believes in anything

      more than he believes in nothing.

    

James Liddy has accomplished what many only aspire to: he has created a remarkable language and voice unmistakably his own.    

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Here is a link to James Liddy’s papers, with more biographical information;

my own archive at Boston College contains 40 letters and 8 postcards from Liddy.

 

Victoria Kennefick: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

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Deposition

 

I love you the way waves love cliffs.

They fling lace skirts against rock,

can-can kicks rush the top,

fall back down; froth clings—a kiss.

Sometimes they wash worn things to shore;

sometimes, they roll silent, say nothing,

tunnel under, hide in echo-dark—

wait until there’s a horizon.

 

I love you in this way because

you are a planet in space that orbits

the sun coolly, allows for oceans.

I love you in this way because

you let me moon about as a pond,

or thrash and flail over piers.

You scoop me up, stone and soil,

sand I’ve made for you. 

 

I love you, don’t mind if I whip in your eye,

erode a piece, I’ll make up for it –

silt and foam, my wedding dress;

spray and salt, my veil, bouquet of blue nets.

I love you because without you there is just sea;

a body all at sea, waving surrender to sky,

kicking and screaming against the line—

water, not going anywhere.

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Victoria Kennefick's debut collection, Eat or We Both Starve (Carcanet Press, 2021), won the Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize and the Dalkey Book Festival Emerging Writer of the Year Award. It was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Costa Poetry Book Award, Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry, and the Butler Literary Prize. A UCD/Arts Council of Ireland Writer-in-Residence 2023 and Poet-in-Residence at the Yeats Society Sligo 2022-23, Victoria is now Cork County Council Writer-in-Residence 2024. Her second collection, Egg/Shell (Carcanet Press, 2024) was a PBS Choice for Spring 2024 and BBC Poetry Extra Book of the Month for March.

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                                Claude Monet, Rough Sea at Étretat, 1883. Oil on canvas, 81 x 100 cm. Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lyon

Joe Kloc: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

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82 Sentences, Each Taken from the ‘Last Statement’ of a Person Executed by the State of Texas Since 1984

 

Um, I don’t know what to say. I am not as strong as I thought I was going to be, but I guess it

only hurts for a little while. I sat in my cell many days wondering what my last words would be.

I’m not going to shout, use profanity, or make idle threats. I am not going to play a part in my

own murder, no one should have to do that. Can you hear me? This here is a tragedy. They are

fixing to pump my veins with a lethal drug the American Veterinary Association won’t even

allow to be used on dogs. I should not have to be here. I’m not a killer. I know how it look but I

didn’t do it. I didn’t kill my wife. I did not kill those drug dealers. I did not murder your loved one.

I am sure he died unjustly, just like I am. I have done everything to prove my innocence.

If I am paying my debt to society, I am due a rebate and a refund. Everybody has problems.

I allowed the devil to rule my life. I was a kid in a grown man’s world. I was sick, afraid, and l

looking for love in all the wrong ways. I messed up, made poor choices. But I am not guilty of

this crime. I don’t think the world will be a better or safer place without me. I hereby protest

my pending execution. There are a lot of things that are not right in this world, I have had to

overcome them myself. You know this ain’t right. I don’t know why all of this happened. I just

played the hand that life dealt me. I understand that you wanted this day to come, you got

what you wanted. I’m sure you think this is wonderful in your eyes. If this takes the pain away,

so be it. Whatever makes y’all happy. I know you believe that you’re going to have closure.

The truth is that you are going to feel empty after tonight. A revenge death won’t get you anything.

Sooner or later every one of y’all will be along behind me. You will answer to your Maker when

God has found out that you executed an innocent man. I wouldn’t wish this on you. I forgive all y’all.

It is all part of life, like a big full plate of food for the soul. Tell everyone I got full on

chicken and pork chops. I am going to miss those pancakes and those old-time black-and-white shows.

Sometimes it works out like this. I would like to tell my wife that I love her and thank her

for all the years of happiness. I don’t want to leave you baby, see you when you get there.

To my kids, stand tall and continue to make me proud. Don’t fight with each other. I know this is

hard for y’all, but we are going to have to go through it. Don’t cry, it’s my situation. I’ll be fine.

I won’t have to wake up in prison anymore. Don’t be angry at what is happening to me. Enjoy

life’s moments because we never get them back. Yesterday was my birthday. Ain’t life a bitch?

Where’s my stunt double when you need one? Oh, Lord. I am going home. I might have lost the

fight but I’m still a soldier. I am taking it like a man, like a warrior. Preparest a table before

me in the presence of my enemies. Tell them I finished strong. Death before dishonor. With this let

all debts be paid that I owed, real or imagined. Lord, send me a chariot. Hallelujah, holy, holy,

holy. I guess that’s it. It’s my hour. Only the sky and the green grass goes on forever. I’m done.

I have come here today to die, not make speeches. Warden, if you are going to murder

someone, go ahead and do it, pull the trigger. Let’s give them what they want. I’m ready when

y’all are. Are they already doing it? I can feel it, taste it. My left arm is killing me, it hurts bad.

Let me know that I will be in Heaven tonight, please let me know, I don’t want to be in Hell

with Satan or anyone else, please, that is something I need to know. I am starting to go. I am going

to sleep now. Begins singing: Amazing Grace.

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Joe Kloc is a Senior Editor at Harper’s Magazine. His first book, Lost at Sea: Poverty and Paradise Collide at the Edge of America, will be published in April.  ["82 Sentences, Each Taken from the 'Last Statement' of a Person Executed by the State of Texas Since 1984" originally appeared in the Sept. 19^th, 2024, issue of the New York Review of Books.]

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                                                   Death row inmate Kevin Cooper's painting, It’s a Generation Thing in America.

 

 

Nathalie Handal: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Awón/Sin

 

We will tell each other that

we can't choose

between one country and another,

we will tell each other

that we will kill

even if we don't want to,

we will regret saying it

and we will start

all over again.

Your pain will hang inside mine,

mine inside yours, you will

comb my hair, and I will comb yours.

You will press your ears against my wall,

I will press mine against your body,

we will love and inspect,

we will try and live

with what follows us—

but no one can change this:

we are unable to tear

our eyes from each other.

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Nathalie Handal has been described as a “contemporary Orpheus.” She has lived in four continents, is the author of 10 award-winning books, translated in over 15 languages, including Life in a Country Album, winner of the Palestine Book Award, and The Republics, lauded as “one of the most inventive books by one of today’s most diverse writers,” and winner of the Virginia Faulkner Award for Excellence in Writing and the Arab American Book Award. Handal is the recipient of awards from the PEN Foundation, Lannan Foundation, Fondazione di Venezia, Centro Andaluz de las Letras, and Africa Institute, among others. She is professor at New York University-AD, and writes a column, “The City and the Writer” for Words without Borders.  [Author photo by Andrea Salerno.]

“Awon / Sin”: Aramaic. Awon appears frequently throughout the Old Testament, and in parallel with other words related to sin, such as chatta'th and pesha’.

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       Tahia Halim (1919-2003), Four Women Braiding Each Other’s Hair. Halim was an Egyptian painter celebrated for her poetic and folkloric works.

Harry Northup: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

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"i'm taller," she says

 

she sits on the toilet

with the top down

a red towel on the top

 

he washes her inner thighs

with warm water & soap

he washes the outside of

her legs, her feet

 

he takes her back brace off

washes her full breasts,

her round belly, her shoulders

her back around the large

bandage—he dries her

 

he puts lotion on the washed

& dried areas

he helps her put a new, clean

blue & white nightgown on

 

he places the back brace on

the back first, then the front

he pulls the three straps

tightly, secures them

 

he helps her up

she walks to bed

it's her second day home

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Poet and actor Harry E. Northup has published twelve books of poetry, the latest being Love Poem to MPTF (Cahuenga Press, 2020).  He received his B.A. in English from C.S.U.N., where he studied with Ann Stanford.  Northup made his living as an actor for 34 years, appearing in 37 films, including Mean Streets (1973), Taxi Driver (1976), and The Silence of the Lambs (1991); he also starred in the acclaimed cult film, Over the Edge. Harry has been a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences since 1976.  He lives in the Motion Picture Country Home in Woodland Hills, California, where he produces and hosts a weekly, one-hour poetry show on Zoom called Harry's Poetry Hour (Creative Chaos MPTF).  He has done 216 shows, of which 206 have been posted on Harry's Poetry Hour YouTube channel. [Author photo by Alexis Rhone Fancher]

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                                                           Rembrandt van Rijn, Bathsheba at Her Bath,1654 

Phoebe MacAdams: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

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Autobiography with Fingers

            for John Wieners

 

I dream of a fist,

undelineated lumps

pushing out to form fingers.

 

On my 11 pm walk

mockingbird, skunk, possum, coyote

hold the struggle for form.

 

The fist emerges

in the bleak early morning.

I wash towels, make beds.

 

Poetry asserts itself

humbly,

 

formed me out of madness when I was young

and knew only magic

 

watching a tree turn orange

at the boarding school in upstate New York,

reading fairy tales alone in a top floor bedroom.

 

At my grandmother’s house, I sat on a bench shaped rock.

I felt rescued by her large stone rabbits

 

and by John Wieners who came to our house in Buffalo

and talked to ghosts while he drank Crème de Menthe

in our dining room.

 

I pray for an answer to a neighbor’s green plastic grass,

slim stars overhead,

raccoon slipping along the shadows,

possum moving up the driveway.

 

I woke up and my father was on his way to the hospital,

sweet deranged man

born too early for the medicines that could have saved him.

 

My sister sat alone in a rocking chair for years,

fierce guardian of the good

in the half-way house in Woodstock, New York.

 

She came to me in a dream,

thick black hair and Old Testament robes,

with a helpful message from St. Joseph, patron saint of good death.

 

Today, a man sits crying at the end of a driveway,

his much-loved cat of fifteen years

lies dead in a box at his feet.

 

I search for clarity among the cucumber leaves,

long for grammatical order,

but loss is the order that comes.

 

These are the fingers forming.

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Phoebe MacAdams was born and raised New York City, but has mostly lived in California, moving to LA in 1986. With the poets James Cushing, the late Holly Prado, Harry Northup, and Jeanette Clough, she is a member of Cahuenga Press, which published five of her eight books, including in 2016 her new and  selected volume, The Large Economy of the Beautiful. In 2017, Beyond Baroque published Every Bird Helps: A Cancer Journal. She taught English at Roosevelt High School in Boyle Heights until her retirement in 2011. She lives in Pasadena with her husband, Ron Ozuna. [Author photo by Alexis Rhone Fancher.]

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                                                              R. B. Kitaj, John Wieners, 1969. Photo by Carlie Febo.

Cameron Barnett: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

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Murmur

 

This became my first ghost: the drum

of a stethoscope to my infant chest, an echo

deep in a doctor’s ear, the sound she heard,

named it murmur—a swoosh in the space

between the beatings of my youngest heart

                        ~

When I’d run around as a toddler, my mother

always anticipated me falling down and not

getting back up. Later, my father’s stethoscope

told us there was nothing there—this became

my second ghost

                        ~

I played every sport I could growing up. I ran

until no kid in my class could outpace me.

I beat my heart up and down playgrounds and courts,

through grass stains and bloody knees. I wanted

to learn how to make my heart sing, and I wanted

to silence it too, but always my mother’s gaze

pressed heavy on me

                        ~

Be careful she would say, and Be careful Dad would say.

I ignored them. When I did karate in high school,

squaring up against men twice my size, my mother said

Be careful and my father said Be smart and because

I didn’t care for my heart then, I was careless

                        ~

Heartbreak came when I fell in love for the first time,

and my mother said nothing and my father said nothing,

and years passed with no echo to interrupt the ending,

as they held me, and we all listened to my third ghost

singing in the space between heartbeats

                        ~

And now I run, miles a day, for my health; and now I am

a haunted house of scars; and now I always fear,

like too many men in my family, that I will die because

of my heart; I always fear, like too many Black men,

that a heart is not enough to keep me alive

                        ~

We are all ghost stories, silent chests, a heavy wager

of collapse, and isn’t this what all our mothers fear?—

the fourth ghost: every echo of love misplaced somewhere

deep in our hearts, reconvening over us in our stillness,

murmuring Be careful

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Cameron Barnett is a Pittsburgh poet, teacher. He’s the author of The Drowning Boy’s Guide to Water and Murmur, from Autumn House Press. His work explores the complexity of race, place, and relationships for Black people in America.

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                                                                 Adeboye Abiodun, Diary of a Black Boy, Lost Ball 1

 

 

Alice Notley: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

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Secret

 

Something I don't want anyone to know

having naturally secrets where you hid some thing

under the ground, mine from myself      But are they

only linguistic, something you don't tell

what can the poem say for example or not, Jocko

he was a guy in my class. animals flowers and rocks

spoken of by humans as if mysterious

Are you mad at me? I could list them over

the last seventeen . . . years . . . my eyes hurt.

Ruefully      Some people I dislike I don't tell others

about. I didn't tell you I live alone to act crazy

blistering winds of malfortune keep oh keep arising

my thought comes from nowhere my mis-

shapen mind my mind I hardly recognize in its

abnormality      who recognizes, of course. I'm

being secretive, but all of this comes from a void

Everything's a secret and if you know so

you can act. The blank thought behind all the rules

you don't let yourself know you follow.

You don't want me particularly; I could ap-

prove of your magisterial complicity in how

"we" "do" "things"      Convince me that you secretly . . .

the throes of opportunity . . . complots . . . secretly

And now I would confess some "weakness"

My problem with the confessional: I'm not a

Catholic      took it with her to the grave. Grave Alice

My secret is that I'm in complete control of my-

self; no matter how it seems; and how I do it, is a secret.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Alice Notley has published over fifty books of poetry and prose, most recently Being Reflected Upon (in which "Secret" may be found), The Speak Angel Series, and Telling the Truth As It Comes Up. She is also a visual artist and collagist and is the author of Runes and Chords, a selection of her poem/drawings. She has edited or co-edited three poetry magazines, CHICAGO, Scarlet, and Gare du Nord. She has also edited or co-edited books by poets Ted Berrigan and Douglas Oliver. Since 1992 Notley has lived and worked in Paris, France.

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                                                   Felix Nussbaum (1904–1944), The Secret, oil on canvas, 1939.

Rupert Wondolowski: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

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Tears Are Time Travel

 

I didn’t feel well.

Granny let me stay

home from school.

45 years passed.

Father died.

Like a champ.

Didn’t even dip into

the painkillers the

hospice left in plenty.

The night before he went

I asked him how he was doing.

He said “Okay, I just have to beat this.”

The day he died

bulldozers started tearing

at the woods behind our house.

A long feared and protested event

happening now like a staged

scene in a John Sayles movie.

Mother died.

Not so good.

Howls of the soul so

twisted and agonized that

a lifetime of horror movies,

Catholic school

and Flannery O’Connor

could not prepare me for.

I hunted mushrooms

in my backyard woods

wearing soggy Batman slippers

with my granny.

I’m still there.

I’m pretty much here.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Rupert Wondolowski is the author of Dreams Are My Social Life (Publishing Genius), Mattress In an Alley, Raft Upon the Sea (Fell Swoop), The Origin of Paranoia as a Heated Mole Suit (Publishing Genius), and The Whispering of Ice Cubes (Shattered Wig Press). From 1988 to 2007 he edited the Shattered Wig Review literary arts zine and Shattered Wig Press, publishing 27 issues of the Review and close to 20 chapbooks by national authors, including many by cult author and artist Blaster Al Ackerman, on the Press.  During that time he also hosted monthly Shattered Wig Nights at the legendary Baltimore club, 14 Karat Cabaret, run by artist Laure Drogoul.

Since 2013 he has performed in spectral folk adjacent The Mole Suit Choir with Liz Downing and, since 2020, Greg Hatem. They have recorded and released three albums, Campfire Spacesuit, Phantom Paddle Boat, and Doomsday Lamp. They set the poetry of Rupert and other Baltimore poets to music with guitar, bowed banjo, and electronics.

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                                                                          Flannery O'Connor. Self-Portrait, 1953

Lola Haskins: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

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The Discovery

 

On walking, in my seventies, down a leafy street

behind two women in their early forties who

are chatting to each other as companionably

as birds on a limb, and having thought, with

happy anticipation, ah, I'll be their age soon!

it occurs to me that I've lost my mind—but

just then the clouds evanesce and light pours

through the oaks and ash, to form lace on

the pavement lovely enough to be sewn

into dresses, and I see that time is as

random as the patterns the sun makes on

any given day as it filters through leaves,

and as illusory as a baby being born, and

as strange as the years of our lives that

go by without returning, and as equal as

the one friend's auburn hair and the red leaf

she steps over, which the wind has abandoned

for love of her.  And now, having finally

seen that the world is every minute new,

I realize that I'm only a little younger than

those women after all, and I step between

them, and we speak as we walk, and by

the time we part, each of us in her own way

has told the others how lucky she is,

to have been alive in such a beautiful place.

_______________________________________________________________________________________

Lola Haskins has published 14 books of poetry and three of nonfiction. Her work has appeared widely in magazines and been broadcast on the BBC and NPR. Her latest collection, Homelight (Charlotte Lit Press 2023), was named Poetry Book of the Year by Southern Literary Review, and was a Hoffer Grand Prize finalist. The one before that, Asylum (University of Pittsburgh, 2019), was featured in the New York Times Magazine and will shortly be featured in The John Clare Journal. Past honors include the Iowa Poetry Prize, two NEAs, two Florida Book Awards, narrative poetry prizes from Southern Poetry Review and New England Poetry Review, a Florida's Eden prize for environmental writing, and the Emily Dickinson prize from Poetry Society of America.  

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                                          Vincent van Gogh, Olive Trees (1889), Minneapolis Institute of Art.

Jacob Anthony Ramírez: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

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The Lives of Jazz Fathers

 

Let’s resurrect the trumpet players;

the saxophonists named for fauna gone

extinct in the Congos and Barrios,

the worship and wail, the shadow song

 

of 40s Noir—black and white ailments

of New York’s terminally cool.

There are no more quartets—

only quartered ensemble split from

 

cities coated to chin, faces blurred white

in pedestrian winds and yellow cabs.

Now, the drummers search estate sales, rummage

for swivel stools to post on Etsy. The bassists

 

study Phlebotomy, read blood panels for Diabetes.

The pianists work dental offices, drill tartars

to reveal the whites of cuspids. The saxophonists

teach Tai Chi classes, sleep at the Chinatown Y.

 

I mean to say I miss them: the notes who stroll

October for pick up chess in parks

with coffees and fingerless gloves; the chop

chords at brick-and-mortar steak houses;

 

the soloists smile in the amber memory

of nightclubs numb with intoxication.

They’re dead – the blue veranda is silent

where they jammed, moon drift in palm

leaves and ivory; notes of copper and zinc.

_______________________________________________________________________________________

Jacob Anthony Ramírez is an educator and poet. He is a distinguished graduate of Lancaster University’s Creative Writing M.A. In 2022, Oxford Brookes University’s Ignition Press released Kitchen Boombox, his debut pamphlet. His poetry appears in The Breakbeat Poets, LatiNEXT, The Best New Poets 2022, and Latino Book Review. He is currently at work on his first full collection in Sonoma County, California, where he lives with his wife and two children.

__________________________________________________________________________________              William P. Gottlieb, Portrait of Thelonious Monk, Howard McGhee, Roy Eldridge, and Teddy Hill, Minton’s Playhouse, New York, 1947.

Andrea Cohen: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

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Fable

 

I’m tired of meaning, says the tortoise

to the hare, who agrees. The lions

 

and crows don’t disagree, and the snake

chimes in: it would be better if we didn’t

 

have to moonlight as morality lessons.

Exactly, says the chicken. I’d like to let

 

loose once in a while, I’d like to

stretch my wings, she says. Yes,

 

says the fox. You should get out

of your pen more, says the fox. You

 

should let me help, says the fox,

opening the latch to the evening.

 

It was a fine evening and a fine

conclusion they were coming to,

 

thought the fox, helping the

chicken out of her feathers.

__________________________________________________________________________________________

Andrea Cohen is the author of eight books of poetry, including, most recently, The Sorrow Apartments, Everything, and Nightshade.  Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Threepenny Review, The New York Review of Books, Poetry, and elsewhere. She directs the Blacksmith House Poetry Series in Cambridge, MA.

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                                            Aesop, Johann Michael Wittmer (1802–1880), oil on canvas

 

 

Troy Jollimore: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

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On the Origins of Things

 

Everyone knows that the moon started out

as a renegade fragment of the sun, a solar

flare that fled that hellish furnace

and congealed into a flat frozen pond suspended

between the planets. But did you know

that anger began as music, played

too often and too loudly by drunken performers

at weddings and garden parties? Or that turtles

evolved from knuckles, ice from tears, and darkness

from misunderstanding? As for the dominant

thesis regarding the origin of love, I

abstain from comment, nor will I allow

myself to address the idea that dance

began as a kiss, that happiness was

an accidental import from Spain, that the ancient

game of jump-the-fire gave rise

to politics. But I will confess

that I began as an astronomer—a liking

for bright flashes, vast distances, unreachable things,

a hand stretched always toward the furthest limit—

and that my longing for you has not taken me

very far from that original desire

to inscribe a comet's orbit around the walls

of our city, to gently stroke the surface of the stars.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________

Troy Jollimore’s poetry collections include Earthly Delights, Syllabus of Errors, which was chosen by the New York Times as one of the ten best poetry books of 2015, and Tom Thomson in Purgatory, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has received fellowships from the Stanford Humanities Center, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Guggenheim Foundation. He has also authored or edited four books of philosophy, including Love’s Vision and On Loyalty. He lives in Northern California, where he teaches philosophy.

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                                                       Jan Steen, The Dancing Couple. Oil on canvas,1663. National Gallery of Art

Esther Lin: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

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Habit

 

My husband’s favorite is to suffer.

I too have taken this up;

 

I pant for what I can’t have.

The world is full of trite regard.

 

Those who love lightly as houseflies

do so because they expect calamity,

 

and those who love passionately

demand a righting of ancient wrongs.

 

My mother did both.

Her voice high and keen

 

from the bed she routinely took ill.

I brought her pills; she shared them

 

with me and I went off into my own life,

fearing and trusting everyone.

 

________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Esther Lin was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and lived in the United States as an undocumented immigrant for 21 years. She is the author of Cold Thief Place, winner of the 2023 Alice James Award, co-editor of Here to Stay: Poetry and Prose from the Undocumented Diaspora (HarperCollins, 2024), and author of The Ghost Wife, winner of the 2017 Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship. She was a Writing Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown, and a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. Her work won a Pushcart Prize in 2024, and was featured in the Best of the Net 2023 anthology and Best New Poets 2022. Currently she is a critic at large for Poetry Northwest. She lives in Seattle, Washington.

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                                                   Street art, possibly by Brazilian artist Derlon Almeida.
   

Philip Metres: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

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Plague Psalm 90

 

Loss, you have been our regent,

Refusing the refugees
                                     you sent.

You turn hummingbirds to dirt

and feed humans
                       to earth.

 

You wipe out the watchers

In the night of your butcher.

 

Truly we’re boxed in an annex

Of the mansion
                      of your text.

 

By your annotation
                                  we’re smashed,

Filled with the alphabet of wrath.

For the annals of our days

Will be washed away.

 

May we reside
                        in the skies

of others’ eyes.

_________________________________________________________________________________________________

Philip Metres has written twelve books, including Fugitive/Refuge (2024) and Shrapnel Maps (2020). Winner of three Arab American Book Awards and a Guggenheim, he is professor of English and director of the Peace, Justice, and Human Rights program at John Carroll University.

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                                     Mohammad Murad Obeidi, 5 Gigabytes of My Memory. Mixed media on canvas, 2011.

Adrian Blevins: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

________________________________________________

Quiet Part Out Loud

You are 9/10ths the heresies you cherish /  1/10^th something saintly, beaten & sly.   
                                                                                                ---- Rita Mae Reese

 

Years after it was over and he was gone, I would think of the unfortunate woman
he was living with now and engaged to marry. Poor woman with the face so pale and flat

like a slide down a mountain rock. Poor plus-fifty bride-to-be with the voice too whispery
and the chin too jutty. The hair too thin and white, the thighs too big, the walk so lumbering.

Years after it was over and he was gone, the face of that woman would wake me like I myself
had been recruited to fuck her and I had to get my courage up. Did I suspect that my ex-husband

couldn’t really want to do it? Or was I trying to find a way to finally face his lack of a certain
vital fervor? Was my ex-husband also unlovely? A petty bureaucrat?  Stupidly matter-of-fact?

A tawdry accident? But the teeth too small! The cheeks too wide! And the whole head far too big
like a pond on the end of a stick. And me so superficial with my sick heart in the darkness going

horse, horse, cow, cow. Yes yours truly that hollow like a puddle on a road at midnight in a ghost town
by amine. Honestly I did not care what he did except for what it said about the ugliness in me

that I could not seem to get over the ugliness of her. Unless that’s wrong and I did care that he would
dare taint our lost little family with a woman with a face like that. We had lived on a granite hillside

overlooking an ancient lake in a house of African violets. All around us my father’s paintings
like a cove of orange blossoms. Or a river of luxe bodies oiled to flame on a sunset beach.

And this antique lamp my mother gave us—this knockout of a lamp glowing on the desk
where I shut my eyes now to try to see everything like something died and made it Queen.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Adrian Blevins is the author of Status Pending, winner of the Maine Literary Prize for Poetry (Four Way Books, 2023); Appalachians Run Amok, Live from the Homesick Jamboree; The Brass Girl Brouhaha; and Walk Till the Dogs Get Mean, a co-edited collection of essays by new and emerging Appalachian writers. She is the recipient of many awards and honors including the Wilder Prize from Two Sylvias Press, a Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and a Rona Jaffe Writer’s Foundation Award, among others. She directs the Creative Writing Program at Colby College in Waterville, Maine. ____________________________________________________________________________________________________

                                                         Quinten Massys (Flemish, ca. 1465--1530), Ill-Matched Lovers.