Shell Casings

Beth Oast Williams

February cracks her frozen
bones around my throat.
Turning blue was my own fault.
I wore the book jacket out
in the cold, forgot the true story
it told. That mirror won’t bring
the sun any closer, it shines
            a made-up face to the snow.
Brown blades of grass bend drunk
from icicled dew, their dreams
of green just guitars in a field.
            I wonder what the backsides
of clouds look like, a wig
            of mother’s gray hair or merely
a bag of unspent bolts. All this
            while David’s ankles struggle
to keep that once-perfect man erect.
            Take a peek underneath, the tick
of an alarm clock beats like a bomb.

---

Author’s Note: This poem began on an airplane with the sun beating through the window. Looking down, I couldn’t see the ground because we were above the clouds. I realized people below were experiencing a cloudy day and began to think about how so many things are not what they seem. 

---

Beth Oast Williams’s poetry has appeared in Leon Literary Review, SWWIM Everyday, Wisconsin Review, Glass Mountain, GASHER Journal, Poetry South, Fjords Review, and Rattle's Poets Respond, among others. Her poems have been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize. Her first chapbook, Riding Horses in the Harbor, was published in 2020. 

All That I Don't Know About Birds

Angela Kirby

The time that passes between the small feathered fury of mating
and the solitary laying of eggs; where and how the man of the nest
spends his time: she is carefully opening herself to the future;

What they think about arms when they see us, if we appear
fresh plucked, grounded: or do they curl wingtips and dream
little bones, little fingers stiffening preened feathers;

Where they carry the nails, the hammers, the string; what they build
inside hedges, behind leaved screens: what they love and crucify;

How two birds find each other again and again in the whole sky.

---

Angela Kirby is the 2022 Second Prize Winner in the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry. Publications include Nimrod International Journal, Roanoke Review, Humber Literary Review, Another & Another: An Anthology Of The Grind, Seam|Ripper, and Lament for the Dead. She writes in the mountains of North Carolina.

Something I Saw as a Problem Years Before

Adriana Rewald

I’ve noticed my jaw moving
further out of alignment.
My dentist is in Detroit and
my orthodontist in Warsaw.
It’s so easy
to list off the origins of these
souvenirs: my Seoul earrings,
my Istanbul scarf, my Sarajevo
purse. The St. Croix bracelet,
the Belgrade diagnosis, the
Roanoked heart, the scar
Fincastle left on my foot,
and this new Guangzhou-cut
hair uncurling in protest,
dragging lines across my face
in foreign mirrors.
Everything gets here somehow.

---

Author’s Note: I had just moved to a new country and was reflecting on the idea of place and belonging, which manifested as a catalogue of my belongings both physical and abstract. Each place I've lived has left me something that I continue to carry, for better or for worse. During the most difficult moments of adjusting to a new home, I find comfort in remembering all these pieces that refuse to be disconnected by border crossings.

---

Adriana Rewald (she/her) is a writer and translator who was born in Detroit and raised in Warsaw, Poland. She received her MFA from Hollins University and her poetry has appeared in Artemis, Toho, Poets Reading the News, High Shelf, and on poets.org. Her work as an international school teacher has taken her to South Korea, Serbia, and, currently, China.

À Dieu

Hibah Shabkhez

When the last hunched seagull is gone
And the murmuring waves unlit,
I lose
All shame.
For one last word to dwell upon,
To drive inward like a horse's bit
I choose
Your Name

---

Author’s Notes:

The first seeds of this poem came to me while watching the sun set over the sea at Port Picain. Afterwards, I fiddled with the words I had hastily jotted down, offering them different forms until they sounded just right.

---

Hibah Shabkhez is a writer of the half-yo literary tradition, an erratic language-learning enthusiast, and a happily eccentric blogger from Lahore, Pakistan. Her work has previously appeared in Black Bough, Zin Daily, London Grip, The Madrigal, Acropolis Journal, Lucent Dreaming, and a number of other literary magazines. Studying life, languages, and literature from a comparative perspective across linguistic and cultural boundaries holds a particular fascination for her.
Linktree: https://linktr.ee/HibahShabkhez

grey. true_the box. Ladder.

Eric Lunde

---

Author’s Note:

I spent the first year of the plague with Paul Celan. And while watching all the other plagues develop while barricaded in my basement studio/bunker, I started working on a series of poems I titled “Grey. True_ The Box. Laddder” And while I worked through those, I started constructing prints that would interpret the poems graphically. The three presented here at Roanoke Review are from that series. These prints are block prints printed from wood type I found and assembled.

---

Eric Lunde lives in Minneapolis, MN, USA. With many years of engagement in the arts, he now primarily works in hand-made books, printing, "letter press" of his own design, writing and self-publishing. Samples of his work and activities can be viewed at: https://endythekid.blogspot.com.