Sudden Empathy

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María DeGuzmán

Mystic’s Vision

You open the book to a bowl, a hooded figure cupping fire, rotating updrafts of wind.

Autopoiesis of the Ouroboros

A snake eating its own tail, a phantom feline at the bedside of the dying,
a survivor remembering the others drowned at sea.

Petitions of the Dying

Confabulations with the dead begin in the zone of departure.
Flotsam of your history, they swim up.
Sinking down, you have never been so lucid.

We Watch You as You Ride Through Treacherous Currents

Successive storms have brought you here,
to a rider on a pale horse,
under a lowering sky of invisible witnesses.

Dalí & The Rocks of the Cap de Creus

The dead practice sudden empathy
with a precision rare in the living.
They remind you of refuge & awe
among sea caves of remembered turquoise.

Author’s Note: I obtained the photographic images by stirring water around in a bowl with a spoon and photographing the interaction between daylight and the moving water. Images such as these constitute a sort of optical unconscious, what surpasses our ability to see in the moment, but that is, nevertheless, there, as the photographic process reveals. However, what is “there” involves continual acts of interpretive perception on the part of viewers, myself included. I imagined the images proffered by the water bowls as pages in a picture book. The pictures suggested to me the verses of the photo-poem. These images appeared in my water bowls between late June and late October 2021, over a course of four months during the COVID-19 pandemic. They seem consonant with the reckonings, grief, and sorrow of these times characterized not only by the pandemic, but also by rapidly accelerating climate change, mass displacements and migrations, and a heightened awareness of the ever-present proximity of illness and death. Simultaneously dark and luminous, the uncanny formations of these images lend themselves to visionary transports and space-time travels that expand the spectrum of potential responses and engagements with them.

María DeGuzmán is a scholar, conceptual photographer, creative writer, and music composer / sound designer. Her photographic work has been exhibited at The Institute of Contemporary Art (Boston, MA, USA), Watershed Media Centre (Bristol, England), and Golden Belt Studios (Durham, NC, USA). She has published photo-text pieces in many literary journals, among them Typehouse Literary Magazine, Oxford Magazine, Mandorla: New Writing from the Americas, and Huizache: The Magazine of Latino Literature. Her SoundCloud website may be found at: https://m.soundcloud.com/mariadeguzman.

Home Cooking

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Brendan Galvin

I would cut my right arm off
for Magdalena Sacco, Foley said
out front of Ernie’s Pizza. We were
fifteen, of logic and non-sequitur
knew zero, but raised our eyebrows
to concede First Love. This morning
when I sliced a nine-grain loaf
too deeply with the serrated knife
I thought of that. My thumb pad bled
again. Bagels are toughest, but I
have wrung my hands in aloe
for not using kitchen mitts except
as sock puppets to make you laugh
in your living-room hospital bed.
Your favorite the red-bellied
woodpecker’s a regular at the suet
from there, and you can’t see me
in your kitchen butchering myself.
Hot skillet handshakes; cuts and nicks.
No microwave exploding veggies
fifty years ago in my bachelor pad.
A few pots boiled to black then, and some
pork chops solid as ashtrays,
but fear was never an ingredient
until the visiting nurses, wheelchair,
brace, this whole endeavor. Love, I will
take more care. I will not cut
my right arm off for you.

Author’s Note: My wife had a serious stroke before she passed away, and that left her in a hospital bed in the living room, with me in the kitchen doing the cooking. Since I’ve been writing poems for 57 years, I am always looking for subjects, and when this happened in the kitchen it recalled the events outside the pizza joint a few thousand years ago. I am always looking to combine things in my poems that really have nothing to do with each other.

For the last fifty-seven years, Brendan Galvin has been seriously writing poems, and is currently working on his twentieth volume. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, Poetry, Atlantic, Harper’s, the New Republic, Nation, Kenyon Review, Paris Review, Georgia Review, Gettysburg Review, Southern Review, Shenandoah, Tri-Quarterly, and many others. Habitat: New and Selected Poems 1965-2005 was a finalist for the National Book Award, and the Sotheby Prize of the Avon Foundation was awarded to him by Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes in 1989. He has also written critical essays, book reviews, a translation of Sophocles’ Women of Trachis (Penn), and been a manuscript consultant for sixteen publishers, magazines, contests and arts commissions. Photo credit to Ellen Galvin.

Touching Angels

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Erin Wilson

I want to live
in a ramshackle shack
that touches—hyper-touches—
air, and have that shanty
startle back
like a child that has lured
and then touched a snake.

I want birch trees to mean
something to the utensils I use.
I want my spoon to have,
beneath the happy that it is,
a proper volume of vital sadness.

I want drakes, whippoorwills and meadow larks
to wheel in my dreams,
warbling their declarations and afflictions
amidst the woody rabble,
tearing thorns from the matte-brown
walls of this apartment block.

I want to learn to be so still
the hawk,
bound in its ancestral feathered mask,
will rise
god-like
from a glade,
to glide close over me,
perusing my ribs
like aisles in a grocery store.

I want to be attuned with the languages
of grasses, the harmony of culling.

Even for just one season
I want to be absolutely inside the pagan architecture
of summer.

The acrid stench of burning toast
will be no person's cataclysm,
only a strange galvanizing force
sent out by something ablaze, not someone next door,
for there will be no neighbours.

From my roots, I will listen hard to understand,
then leaning forward, listen harder,
and disappear through a hole in the night.

Author’s Note: This poem was written one summer from a ditch on a back road in rural Ontario. I would drop my son off for work and take refuge at this out-of-the-way place until it was time for me to start work. Standing there, on the side of the road in the early morning light, as away from people as I could manage on such a schedule, I was nearly rent with longing to be there more. It seemed like the cells of my body vibrated with the same intensity and desire as viper's bugloss, trefoil, chicory. The animals seemed separated from me by only the thinnest veil. I wanted absolute knowledge. What could possibly be enough? I wanted to explode into light, become absorbed into darkness.

Erin Wilson's poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Reed Magazine, The South Carolina Review, CV2, The Emerson Review, and in numerous other publications and anthologies internationally. Her first collection is At Home with Disquiet; her second, Blue, is forthcoming (both from Circling Rivers Press). She lives in a small town on Robinson-Huron Treaty territory in Northern Ontario, the traditional lands of the Anishnawbek.

To a Tattoo

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Emma Aylor

It’s just a line, really, and from the side
appears to be a crimped string, or nothing
much—a bobby pin with twists worked in,
edge of a broken oak, some given crumble—
though right side up it’s clear it’s mountains, two,
if not ones a person where I am now could know.
The bend in dear land is far from here. The kind
of sky is different now, a clarity I can’t sit beside.
Air should be so thick you can lean your body
along. Sky should be hazed as collodion, bright
and shade etched rare and strange as moved.
This is the world I’ve known. The story:
my mother drew the mountains loved,
Sharp and Flat (once Round), Peaks
of Otter, soft kick off the Blue Ridge, there
middling the back of the Appalachians. The artist
we wanted couldn’t be had, so we, impatient, took
another, a trainee, nervous, who drew the gun down
my mother’s forearm’s thinned skin the way you might
tow a knife on leather. To notch a mark. Mama—it’s late,
I think, for formality, to hide the call—closed her eyes
and smiled. Her line is vertical, up the radius; mine
horizontal, parallel to the elbow crease. And both
a little ruined, as it happens to a body anyway,
the lines bluer and thicker in kind than my older,
neater tattoo. You can see where my mountains
began to be drawn. You can see, hundreds
of miles from here, a match. You can strike
little warmth against the familiar trace
if I hold my arm a certain way

Author’s Note: I wrote this poem in homage to a tattoo my mother and I share, and to Bedford County, Virginia, where I grew up beside the Peaks of Otter.

Emma Aylor’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in New England Review, AGNI, Colorado Review, the Yale Review Online, 32 Poems, and the Cincinnati Review, among other journals, and she received Shenandoah’s 2020 Graybeal-Gowen Prize for Virginia Poets. She lives in Lubbock, Texas, where she is a PhD student at Texas Tech University.

What's Not to Like?

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James McKee

Doors, because they close;
books, after they end;
spring, while it explodes;
cash, before it spends;

chocolate, because chocolate;
mountains, because a view;
in person, because internet;
wikis, because don’t know;

forests, for all they shelter;
ruins, for what they show;
New York because it alters,
but New York because it won’t;

what if, because why not;
whatever, because I’m lazy;
but now, because too late
for tomorrow, because maybe.

James McKee enjoys failing in his dogged attempts to keep pace with the unrelenting cultural onslaught of late-imperial Gotham. His debut poetry collection, The Stargazers, was published in the spring of 2020, while his poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Burningword Literary Journal, Spoon River Poetry Review, Another Chicago Magazine, New Ohio Review, Grist, New World Writing, Illuminations, CutBank, Flyway, THINK, The Midwest Quarterly, and elsewhere. He spends his free time, when not writing or reading, traveling less than he would like and brooding more than he can help.

Between Cars

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Zebulon Huset

Like a punch-drunk boxer, the rabbit
that darted with reckless abandon
from Home Depot’s overgrown bushes
far too late in the day to safely cross
four lanes, maintained its feet after
its head conked the Civic’s axel.

I was a lane over ignoring a phone
buzzing in my pocket as my foot
left the gas and my focus left the bumper
a couple car-lengths ahead, eyes wide,
brain conjuring sudden prayers
for the fluffball between speeding cars.

I didn’t see if its wits returned
quickly enough to retreat
into the undergrowth. Traffic
and its dozens of vehicles hurtling forward
on one unhinged hurry or another
had no care for the small life in jeopardy.

It had missed the Honda’s tires,
a small blessing that might not
have been repeated once my vision
returned to the many tons of metal
and plastic and rubber that seemingly
constantly endangered my life.

However long that lupine
lived in the ‘real world’ so filled
with and divorced from abstractions—
its lifespan of maybe a decade would fall
far short of the nights I’d eye popcorn
ceilings, wondering if he’d made
the shoulder as I rushed to somewhere
completely unimportant in such a hurry.

 

Zebulon Huset is a teacher, writer, and photographer. He won the Gulf Stream 2020 Summer Poetry Contest, and his writing has appeared in Meridian, The Southern Review, Fence, Atlanta Review, Texas Review, and many others. He publishes the writing blog Notebooking Daily, edits the journal Coastal Shelf, and recommends literary journals at TheSubmissionWizard.com.

The good thing

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Rose Auslander

As I head past sixty-six, I practice saying hello goodbye. The good thing is, it doesn’t take long if you don’t think about it & who has time. The good thing is when you say it, the sun looks like the moon floating silver behind the clouds & the moon never sets, gliding slowly all day long for the next sixty-six years & hey, maybe we’ll be happy. We’ll go on picnics every day. Hair shimmering in sterling light, we’ll unpack our hamper, spread gingham napkins on our laps, eat my mom’s deviled eggs & your mom’s potato salad & wash it down with the vodka my grandpa carried from Russia for luck. Sitting there on sea-soaked rocks, swallowing the last drops of liquid fire, eyes almost closed, we’ll wave at kids casting their lines past the jetty. Not taking time to recognize ourselves gliding past goodbye, we’ll say hello.

 

photo credit: Liz Hanellin

Rose Auslander lives on Cape Cod. Obsessed with water and poetry (not necessarily in that order), she’s written the book Wild Water Child, chapbooks Folding Water, Hints, and The Dolphin in the Gowanus, and poems in Berkeley Poetry Review, Baltimore Review, RHINO, Rumble Fish, Tinderbox, and Tupelo Quarterly.

Two Visual Poems by Melanie Kristeen

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Borderline

Feast

Melanie Kristeen is a poet, writer, educator, and owner of a small content writing business. She holds an MFA in poetry from Texas State University and was the 2019-2020 Poet in Resident at the Clark House in Smithville, Texas. She was the recipient of a Damsite Residency in New Mexico in 2015 and has been published by Rust + Moth, Barren Magazine, Burning House Press, The Boiler, Black Bough Poetry, and University of Hell Press. She was also a commissioned, featured artist for Luminaria: San Antonio Arts Festival in 2017.

The pacific kisses the sand

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Kay Lee

my aunt has many treasured memories
that she never fails to tell me, eyes crinkled 
in corners
fingers pinching skin gently with
an age-old fondness.
 
one of such, she says
with a measured glee,
is one of ten years ago as
my uncle sat with a new 
speaker, a saxophone blaring
through the halls-
the low 
thrum of jazz twirling through
the walls to grip my small hand-
guiding me into a waltz
across my pororo
baby mat.
 
i remember long car rides through
winding california highways the
tide kissing the sand with a quiet
rhythm as 
ed
sheeran belts a high note 
against the leather of the backseat-
half-mumbled lyrics tumbling out of
sleepy lips and into strands of hair
whipping in the salty wind and out
into the embrace of california-sun, 
the cold touch of the 
pacific.
 
i remember listening to 
coldplay start the drums,
guitar taking the stage to
divebomb through the clouds-
and the plane hummed a lullaby;
something low and droning
against the melody of a child’s wail
and the chatter of the flight
attendants
for some reason i can’t explain once you
go there was
never...
my mother snores next to me,
and the guitar picks up as i wave
goodbye to the california
sea.                                                      (it does not wave back.)
 
japanese and korean drift
through song-
i remember writing
english-fied lyrics on the palms of
my hands on
the sides of math textbooks-
writing
            yumenaraba dorehodo 
yokatta 
deshou
rolling unfamiliar syllables across 
my tongue until
letters sound like 
words sound like
lyrics that i never bother
to understand but in
half-sewn sentences winding together
far too late;
            wouldn’t--- be better--- if---
            was--
            a dream?
missing california-sun weighs
like an ache
but perhaps someday i will
understand the
letters-words-lyrics
that i write in fading ink 
on the wide expanse of my too-tan
skin.
 
the guitar drums again-again-again
but i am not ten- not
anymore- and it
bangs against the too-tired edges
of my brain, drowning out
thoughts and so i
pause and i tell it 
            thank you
and
            goodbye
in the same breath
and i listen to the silence echo before
my skull can shatter and
my heart beats hard enough to
break my ribs.
 
the silence holds my hand
and it does not try to
lead me or
bring me into dance.
it 
stands with unblinking eyes and
breathes next to me-
 
-and it lasts until it
doesn’t until
the silence
arranges my bones in
hollow space between
burnt stars so
i find small gems in between
the cracks of famous singers-
aching songs that
slip through fame-
 
            are you lonely?
 
they ask me,
 
            if you’re lonely come be 
lonely with 
me
 
they say, and
they play the guitar but it
thrums like the quiet kiss
of the lips of the pacific against
the sand,
the touch of california-sun against
skin,
the fading sounds of
a lone saxophone
drifting like a ghost through
empty halls. 
 
ultimately
            i believe we’ll be 
okay…
 
they take my hand,
they do not dance,
do not simply stand,
but instead they take my hand
and gently,
 
they tug me 
home.

Kay Lee is a tenth-grader attending Korea International School in Seoul, South Korea. She is currently putting together her writing portfolio and was recently accepted into Juniper's Young Writers Program.

Box World

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Lucy Zhang

Lucy Zhang writes, codes and watches anime. Her work has appeared in New Orleans Review, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Chestnut Review, Black Warrior Review, and elsewhere, and was selected for Best Microfiction 2021 and Best Small Fictions 2021. She is losing sleep over a novel. Find her at https://kowaretasekai.wordpress.com/ or on Twitter @Dango_Ramen.

Cows

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Wendy Cleveland

I pass the farmhouse and fields of cotton
anchored in drought-stricken soil.
Across the road in front of a small barn
they stand in the middle of the pond,
a small herd of cows, some chest deep
with big ears and soft dark eyes staring
toward a field of sunflowers with heads
drooped on dead stalks, seeds now dropped
into a cracked row of dirt.
I stop to photograph, inch through
brittle grass to avoid the sting of  red ants.
The cows turn and look toward me
shifting their weight, ears twitching.
A white egret lands on one black cow
and when she begins her slow move
it flaps and dances, digs deep
into her hide and holds on.
She turns away and begins her plod
out of water and up a knoll, calf right behind,
to a stand of trees, the two of them lugging
their hot bodies single file, heads nodding
with each forward lunge, her udder slung low.
They reach the shade, pause, and only then
does she turn and look at me,
too far away now for a decent photo
yet the picture I see, which I’ll always remember,
is the silhouette of a calf and his mother
and the white bird roosting regal and splendid
like a fine feathered hat atop her broad back.

Author’s Note: This poem was triggered by an image I saw while driving through the countryside in rural Alabama. The summer day was hot and humid, and several black cows were standing in a pond next to a large field. On the far side another cow was lumbering up the hill with a calf following behind toward a stand of trees. Earlier I had seen a white egret on top of a cow in another pond, so I combined the two images.

Wendy Cleveland’s poems have appeared in Persimmon Tree, Yankee, Red Rock Review, and others. Her collection Blue Ford was published in 2017. She is a member of the Alabama Writers’ Forum and attended the Sewanee Writers’ Conference.

How to Sell Vehicles on a Dead Lot

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Addison Griffis

Addison Griffis is a Mississippi writer and finance manager at a car dealership. His poetry is forthcoming in Appalachian Review. Addison is currently querying his literary Western manuscript for representation/publication and working on various recording projects in his barn/studio. Instagram is @addisongriffis

No Phoenixes allowed in mausoleum

/

Richard Weaver

from some sound harmony refrains
from some darkness no light escapes
of this not many thats
for many there are fewer than none
from one kiss endless heartache
for the few there are too many
from the mouths of babes nothing
out of the corner of an eye a myopic mote
nearer the center no magnet pretends
from one path a lifetime lost
with a single breath the end begins
from some fools orange braying abounds

The author hopes to one day once again volunteer with the Maryland Book Bank, CityLit, and return as writer-in-residence at the James Joyce Pub. Other pubs include: Loch Raven Review, Dead Mule, Free State Review, Little Patuxent Review, Connections, Mad Swirl, and Spank the Carp. He’s the author of The Stars Undone (Duende Press, 1992). Recently, his 160th prose poem was published under a checker-board cone of silence. He remains a founder and former Poetry Editor of the Black Warrior Review.

Two Poems by Matt Dennison

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Perfection

Unless something is perfect I don't give a damn.
But perfection includes the kitten my daughter
found yesterday morning after a powerful storm,
hanging by its front leg one foot off the ground
pinched between shrub limbs with an eye
so infected we thought the eye was dead,
wished the kitten dead, immature maggots
crawling the skin she scrubbed in the sink,
scraped thick chunks of matter from the eye
with Q-Tips duly sucked before using
then took to the vet who set the leg,
gave medicines for eye, maggots and dehydration
and is now the purring ball of blue-eyed fur
she carried to her grandmother's funeral
the day after I dreamed she and I were flying
a very small plane, she piloting until I noticed
the sudden influx of violent birds and WWII planes
filling the sky so I thought I'll take over…
at which point the plane shot straight up in the air
and I realized I did not know how to fly a plane
any better than she and we landed on her grandmother's
house and her grandmother was very angry to have us
uninvited as she had “people coming over tomorrow”
but she was finally beautiful, skin so fresh, hair so sleek,
and it was only when I awoke and remembered her
funeral was today that I laughed. Perfection
is often rotten, but it's all there really is.

Until I Listened

I truly despised the sound of the cat’s lapping—
on and on and on the water harvested, ripped
from its placid lake to travel the depths’
insectile broth, opaque’d of necessity borne
within. Such an idiot journey—the fecal instant
delayed, souped repetively: a thousand complaints
unanswered: why why why cried the waterfall
must it be us to flush life’s guts when all we want
is to revel in the sun, disband and float reborn,
one drop to be millioned, each landing on
garbage, leaf and limb—but it is the passage,
we remind ourselves, through which we grace
and grandeur, the cat’s vagina as suitable as flower
to travel dessicate nights, urethral dawns, so lift
your cup and drink us down, soft mouth,
drink us down and piss.

Author’s Note: Both of these poems are based on actual events that, in the process of writing them, expanded beyond their straight-forward beginnings through the triggering of forgotten associations along the way. I had the first line of “Perfection” in my notes, which caused the remembering of the kitten, which led to the remembering of the actual dream, which had been completely forgotten until my daughter told me about taking the kitten to the funeral.

“Until I Listened” began with the writing of the first line after I had removed the cat’s food and water bowls from my writing room, which, silence restored, led to my hearing the water itself complain of its own torture until “we” made the leap of acceptance (though the bowls remain in the hall...).

Matt Dennison is the author of Kind Surgery, from Urtica Press (Fr.) and Waiting for
Better, from Main Street Rag Press. His work has appeared in Rattle, Bayou Magazine, Redivider, Natural Bridge, The Spoon River Poetry Review, and Cider Press Review, among others. He has also made short films with Michael Dickes, Swoon, Marie Craven, and Jutta Pryor.

Two Poems by Junious Ward

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Virginia Health Bulletin, Extra No. 2

Blessings

my black family reunion is jealous                                 my white family reunion is jealous
                                    they are covetous of each other’s things
My mom’s folks use two picnic tables                            while the other reunion requires a resort
                                             one is intimate and one is swollen
this one; we all here despite the odds                              that one; more kin than you ever seen
                                    attendance percentage v. actual numbers
but jealousy peeks through when                                    over a busy, packed-calendar summer
                                    my kids can only tamp down a suitcase for one
they don’t get to see parts of themselves                                   where are the jokes, the cousins
                                                       they missed growing up
driven by instinct, I react as mediator                             playing dozens or spades at the picnic
                                                praying over fish-fry hushpuppies
praying over burgers and dogs                                       what we remind ourselves of is this:
                                                it is important to give thanks for
everything that seems a given                                        every member able to torque a schedule
                                              the meal that brings us together and
fills our spirit like heaping plates, leads us          outweighs envy, no one eats until the prayer
                                                confirms how one we are

Author’s Note: As the product of a southern interracial marriage, I am always keenly interested in the prevailing thoughts and attitudes that were either prevalent when my parents began courting or had been heavily influenced by things like the Racial Integrity Act or this Health Bulletin that announced it. Erasure gives me a way to talk back, to subvert the conversation, to create a contrapuntal where the document is altered by both black space and white space. There is also room, particularly in the footnotes, to contemplate [dominant race]ness—what it means, how it’s viewed, and (for lack of a better term) how it is policed.

My family has two family reunions each year, my dad's side and my mom's side. I wrote the first draft of this poem after a particularly busy summer where my kids could only attend one of the family reunions due to scheduling conflicts. A conversation with them reminded me of how differently they experience these two events, even though they love both reunions. In subsequent edits it seemed natural for the poem to be a contrapuntal, where there was a natural friction and various perspectives that ultimately rejoin to one conclusion—gratitude for family. Oneness.

Junious Ward is a poet living in Charlotte, NC, and author of Sing Me A Lesser Wound (Bull City Press). Junious has attended and/or received support from: Breadloaf Writers Conference, Callaloo, The Frost Place, and The Watering Hole. His poems have appeared or are upcoming in Four Way Review, Columbia Journal, DIAGRAM, The Amistad, Diode Poetry Journal, and elsewhere.

Two Poems by BEE LB

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5/10

i suppose i am safe / i could explain where the doubt
comes in but what would be the point? / i am safe here

i am cradled by a bed holding no memory / i am curled
against the neck of a bottle, the cold feeling better than a body
 
that’s a lie / but am i not allowed a lie to slip through?
i am waiting for an answer / the truth / some sort of satisfaction
 
none come, but i don’t expect it / i expected the emptiness
to spread itself into a blanket for me to lay on, and it did
 
it covered the grass, or the wet, or anything else i didn’t want
to touch / it did what i asked it to / the emptiness
 
i’m going somewhere here / but i can’t decide where
the last three bodies i asked to see did not come
 
it was not a punishment / not anything but fear, a lack
of luck / still, i spread out in the emptiness / waiting
 
for something to find me there and pull me out / ask the right questions
that pull the right answers / from their place beneath my tongue
 
all of this is real, except none of it really / i misjudge
where i’m going, and i can’t walk for days / when i tell you
 
i secretly enjoyed it / i don’t mean it / i mean it was not a secret.

lamentation

i reach for you in my sleep,
find you there within me
i wake to your body bathed in
the blue of pre-dawn
 
i find the comfort of the womb
in the waking world—
i crawl inside
 
grow smaller, smaller,
until there’s nothing left of
who i used to be
 
i find darkness and shrivel into it
i find nothingness in myself
and pull it all out
 
i wish to be whole and full and
straight-backed, for my heart
to weep only in a way
i can bear

Author’s Note: "lamentation" came about in the hazy hours just before dawn, when the difference between dreams and reality can be hard to place. It lives in the interior as an exploration of longing, desire, and lack of its fulfillment. "5/10" examines desire as well, but it exists more as a wry set of excuses, deflections, masking a sincere desire for connection.

BEE LB is an array of letters, bound to impulse; they are a writer creating delicate connections. they have called any number of places home: currently, a single yellow wall in Michigan. they have been published in Crooked Arrow Press, Badlung Press, and Revolute Lit, among others. their portfolio can be found at twinbrights.carrd.co.

Copula

/

Joshua McKinney

what if
if what
we think
is is is
sacred be-
fore the
subject
sucked in-
to predication
completes
any thing?
Or
if is is a
bond, band,
what if what
is does is
tie the pliant
spirit of
a person
to the act-
of-being
and so
in fact un-
tie the price-
less is of
who one is,
the Is in
any of us?

Author’s Note: This poem developed out of my linguistic musing upon the concept of identity and the ways in which language both liberates and enslaves. I think of it, broadly speaking, as a poem of social justice.

Joshua McKinney’s most recent book of poetry is Small Sillion (Parlor Press, 2019). His work has appeared in such journals as Boulevard, Denver Quarterly, Kenyon Review, New American Writing, and many others. He is the recipient of The Dorothy Brunsman Poetry Prize, The Dickinson Prize, The Pavement Saw Chapbook Prize, and a Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative Writing. A member of Senkakukan Dojo of Sacramento, California, he has studied Japanese sword arts for over thirty years.

Shedding Wilderness

/

Jonathan Greenhause

The egret, her beak muddied, fishes
on beanstalk legs
by the pebble-strewn & infinite
laid-down ladder of the freight tracks,
snacks on frogs scared into stillness
at the runoff’s plastic shore,
is perplexed to find herself
this far South, misses the occasional
Aurora Borealis show
& the primal threat of autumnal snow.

Above, upon this car-wide overpass,
I briefly observe her,
feel rushed to arrive to an office
devoid of outstretched wings,
lacking nests, shedding wilderness
like a virus slathered
with the foam of antibacterial soap,
my fingers intertwined
in a rusted diamond fence, as I scan

this abyss between us,
this avian diner appeasing her belly
before the waiting sky’s caressed
by her plumage,
lower limbs snuggled to her body
like a child rocked to sleep
by the wind, as if
in an unraveling cot at risk
of falling, uncertain of where she is.

Author’s Note: The genesis of “Shedding Wilderness” is pretty straightforward: It was written shortly after the experience of viewing an egret fishing by flooded train tracks as I stared down from an overpass on my walk from home to work one morning. I live right across the Hudson from Manhattan, yet am still privileged to see occasional wildlife, whether it be turkeys, deer, racoons, skunks, possums, snakes, herons, hawks, groundhogs, or field mice. At the same time, these brief glimpses of nature can’t help but remind me of all that we’ve lost.

Jonathan Greenhause won the Telluride Institute’s 2020 Fischer Poetry Prize, and his poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in FreeFall, The Ginkgo Prize for Ecopoetry, New York Quarterly, Permafrost, Poetry East, RHINO, and Tampa Review. This is his 3rd time appearing in Roanoke Review.

Two Poems by Elliott Carter

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Aubade

That night you built a bonfire on the street corner— remember? 
Everyone walking by on their way home from parties  
stopped there a while to shiver a little less violently. 
 
You wished they would stay longer as they left. 
To pay a compliment or two to the fire’s precise construction. 
I fantasized going off with them, but I couldn’t leave you cold. 
  
If it had been summer, we would have waited for dawn. 
There would have been birds and dew. But it was winter.  
Nights are long and end just like that. 
 
As the bonfire went out, we went inside. There I was, 
kneeling by your bed, the lights off, holding your hand. 
When you speak, it’s like the world has run out of eyes. 
 
I slept for just a while until you shook me. 
You were never happy with me, so I put my clothes in a bag. 
You followed me out to smoke. A porch will lengthen any goodbye.  
 
What to make of the bus ride home, or the snowflakes? 
There is a gravity to weeping— a sudden collapse, 
like those logs on their knees, crawling deeper into the fire. 

When I Crawled Out the Creek

When I crawled out the creek 
and looked into the water,  
there wasn’t a single feature on my face. 
No nose. No deep-set valley for the eyes.  
There I was, ambiguous, 
incomprehensible,  
Spring’s shadowed oaks   
freeing me from this body. 
 
I grew my hair for a year— 
cut it all off last week. 
Decisions? Just whims  
swelling over time. 
(Last August 
almost told my doctor 
I want to transition.) 
I never could stand that dead silk 
falling into my eyes. 
 
Silt caked into my pelvis. 
Passing by the mirror, 
staring at the face and body 
that is apparently mine,  
all the way into the namelessness  
of steam-trapped curtains, 
the question rises: 
 
What if I’m not? If it’s all a lie? 
 
But “he” turns me to glass. 
And this has been going on 
for a decade. 
 
I am tired of my inaction, but I feel dangerous— 
Every morning, a thousand knives  
sprout from my face. 
 
The surgeries, the hormones,  
could render me acidic: 
a eunuch, and with what beauty left? 
 
Would you be able to tell 
I killed a man to get here? 
Will I leave that much blood on my hands? 

Author’s Note: Poems change so much. I started “Aubade” by obsessing over the key to this house, and this one time I tried to give it back. The person closed my hands around it and told me to keep it. In the end, the time I said “no” turned out to be less emotionally charged than the time I was told to leave. Eventually, abuse can convince us to beg for our own destruction.

I received a comment in a workshop that “When I Crawled Out the Creek” wasn’t quite framed correctly—that transness is more about becoming a person than it is about destroying a person. But emotions are rarely this neat! I don’t like how my body currently is, but I am also terrified of saying goodbye to it. 

Elliott Carter is a non-binary artist who is surviving. They studied poetry at the University of Virginia and has been involved in spoken word communities in the DMV. They want to bury their shame, live a good life. On Twitter and Instagram as @frutsnacc.

I Kept Allison Kramer from Harm and Danger

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Jeff Tigchelaar

(Recurring dream, circa fifth grade)

or harm at least               because danger
was always nigh              because strangers
invaded the playground               time and again
              and tried to whisk Allison away
keyword tried
because I was there        as always
sometimes they got her
              almost to their car
but I came chasing after              and showed them
              what happens to those who take Allison
triumphantly I carried her back
to much applause and buzz         but Allison and I
we just                needed time
                             and so we retreated alone
to that gap                       in the fence
between the little kids’ side and the big kids’ side
              where it was all overgrown

Jeff Tigchelaar is the author of Certain Streets at an Uncertain Hour (Woodley Press, 2015), winner of the Kansas Authors Club Nelson Poetry Book Award. His poems have appeared in AGNI, Beloit Poetry Journal (as runner-up for the Adrienne Rich Prize), Harpur Palate, Hobart, Hawaii Pacific Review, Heavy Feather Review, Rattle, Rhino, The Museum of Americana, New Ohio Review, and North American Review, as well as in Best New Poets, New Poetry from the Midwest, and Verse Daily. Recipient of a poetry fellowship from the Ohio Arts Council, he works at a library in Huntington, West Virginia.