is always second-hand. Always a distant spiral, a curling sign. Even if we breathe it, we keep only vestiges, carbon particles freed from wood or leaves, spinning into our ignorant lungs. My grandfather, an acre away, stirred a black pot spidered over an open fire, and no one can tell me what he mixed or […]
Poetry 64
Michael Graber
I. A Primer on Quilting an Adulterous Scene Weave the high tones of conversation into a quilt, still threadbare where the wind has taken your loose hair. The silence is too much not to mention. Just sew what is hard to say— the tilted face of wild children, our frozen spouses, lonely as dying stars […]
Martin Galvin: The Silence of Eggs
He never told anyone at the monastery How he talked to the chickens as he took The warm eggs from under them, How he forgave their beaks, their sharp Reminders of the privileges of motherhood. He never even told the tree he came to For its murmuring shade to wipe his brow Of the Iowa […]
Jeffrey Franklin: Boundaries of Seeing
for Judy The temptation is to watch the clouds, swollen with moonlight, drift across the night sky, a migrating herd of leviathans, but if you lie spread open on the earth long enough and focus between them, you may see the clouds slow, the obsidian depth behind them ease into motion, and sense yourself, in […]
Samuel Exler: Winter Covers the Nation
It’s time to be alone, solitary As light upon the snow; Snow comes down to warn me Whitman is dead, And the wounded boys lie uncared for on hospital cots; Snow reminds me how much it costs To blow up a city, and how Einstein longed For a reasonable god. Icicles hang From the drainpipe. […]
Christopher Connelly: Orpheus
He was a god, he didn’t need Eurydice. It doesn’t matter that the lavender honey of his too-perfect love hardened, or that he saw the sun from pure darkness. But don’t hate Orpheus, praise him for the space that his failure left between love and the world. That singing means nothing without death is the […]