Category: Poetry

CONFESSIONAL

Michael Chang

 

this poem’s abt me. dead serious. loads of them are: no no zone, almanac of useless talents, fine w/o u, california one night stand, 500 horses outside at the valet, white ford bronco, awful ghosts, carnal flower, rasputin, my forever person, working stiff, sad boy public relations, garden state trick, bleu de chanel, white tennis shoes, suede kisses, internet boyfriend, simpatico, student-athlete’s college recruitment guide, leg of lamb, gin & milk, duck duck goose, still life w/ sunglasses at nite . . . it would be easier to list the poems of theirs i’m not in. they’ve been writing abt me for 12 years. i was one of their earliest students, way back when i was 19. totally fell in love w/ them & let them know it, although i was scared, before having to go home to texas & check into rehab. the whole ordeal left me spinning my wheels, afraid even to go to str8 spaces like home depot. found out a few years ago they’d written a number of love poems abt me. called me catullus, something abt my breath, described my bedroom as having the atmosphere of an operating theater. tried my best to contact them, but they wouldn’t say a word to me. performed my favorite exorcism & purchased shoes for dog. didn’t pay for my chipotle. abandoned tourists on the pier, most definitely high. still they kept writing these damn poems, claiming i’m terrified of intimacy.  no, i’m a very intimate guy, have left a lot of bodies behind.  hey, my eyes are up here.  i get it, there’s only so much waiting around u can do.  i want a family, not a fantasy.  very much falling out of love w/ them.  abt damn time.  their stock is sinking fast.

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A Year of Growth

Jonathan Fink

 

My youngest daughter does not know

that each tree ring marks a year of growth

when she selects a piece of scrap wood

 

from the sawdust and shavings

that have covered our back patio

and carries the board inside to color

 

the rings revealed by the saw blade,

my daughter filling the arching semicircles

until a rainbow appears as her sisters

 

lay other scraps across the floor to make

a path on which to leap from board to board

to furniture and back again in a game,

 

I imagine, every child in history has played,

the game requiring only the belief

that the ground is not as solid as it seems,

 

that a misstep or tip of balance will lead

to peril, whether lava or river or canyon below,

even though, while laughing, they jump again,

 

shrugging off each demise, protesting

only when I collect the boards

and insist that the world be ordered

 

over their appeals to fairness,

the mantra of childhood, to which

I and every parent I know responds,

 

Who says the world is fair? mostly resisting,

though sometimes not, to itemize,

while wielding a clothes-less Barbie

 

or broken toy like a judge’s gavel,

every slight from work and love

and politics both foreign and domestic

 

as the neighbor’s dog howls at the burgeoning

moon and the kids give each other that look

meaning, What’s got into dad—all we meant

 

was we were having fun? which is when

I see myself reflected in the glass

of the patio sliding doors and realize

 

how large I must seem to them,

large, though clearly not authoritative,

as the youngest starts spacing

 

the boards again behind my back,

and I lift one and point to the rings

in the grain, and say, see, this too

 

was once alive, how, though rooted,

it turned it leaves to the warmth of the sun

and drew water from the earth, its limbs

 

not unlike yours when you lift the hems

of your skirts to hop through puddles,

or wave to me from the treehouse

 

we are building together, a project begun

before the passing of their grandmother

though intersecting now with her loss

 

as grief permeates all things, and they ask

the questions one would expect

(if she looks down on them from above

 

just as they, from the tree, look down on me)

and the questions one doesn’t expect

about how the tree feels holding

 

the remains of another tree in its limbs,

transformed, though it is, to a house,

and I tell them trees aren’t capable

 

of abstract thought or have feelings

like we do, though what do I know,

thinking of Michelangelo’s Pieta,

 

and Mary, though stone, holding

her deceased son, and how the body

is itself a house of memory and love

 

and loss, as my wife and I explained

to our daughters, that the sadness they feel

is sadness, yes, but also love transformed,

 

that grief is love for the one who was lost,

just as my wife expressed on the day

before her mother died, after a month

 

of hospice at her mother’s home and the gift,

my wife said, to be there with her,

to measure and administer the morphine

 

when the great pain came, when any touch,

even a blanket, became unbearable,

to honor the effort at the end for her to stand,

 

holding to the walker, and request what would be

her final bath, and my wife, afterwards,

drawing a comb through the fineness of her hair,

 

never more beautiful, my wife saying

that night, and again the next day

even after the workers had come so quickly

 

to take her, to gather and remove

any remaining meds, count every pill

as her final breath still hung in the air,

 

and our daughters cried unceasingly

so that when, that night, we drove away,

the trees that lined the road seemed to bow

 

to the car, to lift their limbs in the breeze,

the undersides of their leaves lighter

than the backs, like the palms of hands,

 

which, I believed, if they could,

they would place on our car, on the shoulders

of my wife, or interweave their limbs

 

as a canopy above us, their petals

below, and the road would no longer

be a road but a tunnel, to where it ascended

 

I did not know, only that we were

like breath released at last from the throat,

becoming the words we were unable to say.

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Elegy Ending with a Slice of Sour-Cream-and-Raisin Pie

Joe Wilkins

 

A boy wants to break
the world in half and put it
in his pocket. All through the eulogy

 

I thumbed a cracked mussel shell
pulled the day before from the shallows
beneath the bridge,

 

the shell’s interior curves so perfect
and slick I could almost feel
the mother-of-pearl—

 

lavender and rose, cream
at the thin, crumbling edge. My collar
itched. I didn’t like the golden

 

corduroys I had to wear,
hand-me-downs from an older
cousin, and still my only pants without

 

mended knees or a patched ass.
The priest needed the cup,
so I held it up. I didn’t know the man

 

who died. He was my grandfather’s age,
which worried me, but not enough
to slow me down

 

(wasn’t my first funeral, wouldn’t
be my last). I shucked
my starched vestments faster

 

than all the other altar boys,
and so was first in line
for a chipped-beef sandwich and pie.

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UPON GOOGLING AN OLD BOYFRIEND AND FINDING HIS OBITUARY

Terry Godbey 

 

Eleven years ago 

he checked outta here, 

dead at 58, 

just as I emerged 

from a cancer chrysalis. 

 

No mention of a wife 

or children, 

and no more chances 

for me to apologize 

for stomping on his heart 

40 years ago. 

 

The absence of kids 

stings a bit 

since his mention early on 

of having little Terrys with me 

was what sent me running, 

still a little Terry myself. 

I wasn’t expecting a man 

to want to stick around. 

Even I didn’t care that much 

for my company. 

 

I don’t remember 

breaking up 

or explaining anything. 

I just stopped  

answering my phone, 

heard his motorcycle  

stirring the summer night 

outside my apartment 

where I was kissing my new man. 

We ran into each other  

at the newspaper where we worked, 

wound up at the same parties 

where his eyes followed me everywhere 

and I accepted his cocaine 

but nothing else. 

  

He moved to D.C., where I heard he crashed  

his motorcycle, struggled with a brain injury, 

but in his 20s he was a sun-burnished god, 

all muscle and quick to smile. 

Good with his hands, he had built  

his own catamaran, and we sailed 

on the Banana River 

and in the Atlantic  

amid pods of dolphins. 

 

His sister left a cryptic online remembrance: 

Unfortunately, he took the wrong path in life. 

So many questions 

and no answers. 

See, here I go again, making it all about me. 

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Two Poems

Carolene Kurien

 

A Confession

I am a bad horse.

I neigh and hoof my way into the houses

of neighborhood husbands

and commission myself for rides

to know straddle and buck.

Some say my mane is the color

of the death beyond death. Some say

it’s best to avoid direct eye contact.

I ask the hydrangea why it is so hard to forgive

people who have changed. Did you know

the more acidic their soil, the bluer

they get? I am not trying to make a metaphor,

but I am saying that most of my daydreams

involve being loved by large groups

of people. I walk into a surprise party

with a banner that reads Happy Birthday,

You Are A Good Person! Someone has baked

my favorite carrot cake. Someone has bought

more mini razors for my mustache. The people I fuck

in my fantasies have no faces. I can barely make out

their bodies. The ghost of myself whimpers

under the ghost of theirselves,

and none of us can smile. The book I am reading

says it’s not my fault. How I am.

That I was just a kid, apparently. But now I am old;

my teeth will fall out soon. And my empty

mouth will no longer have someone else to blame.

 

 

Saudade

I am eating a jam sandwich the taste of rain.

I am finding it difficult to harness myself

into the concept of forgiveness. Rosmarie Waldrop

wrote Your skin was delicate, like a retracted confession.

The dent in your back I placed wishing coins upon

thin and deepening. Your empty, welling face.

Under a microscope, various teardrops have various

physiognomies. Onion tears reach outward like rhizomes,

ever-wet and blooming. Tears of ending and beginning

are Rorschach tests filled with your features: a boat-shaped

birthmark, a whisper of nose. Under the streetlight I pick

a painting and live it. I walk the cliff at Pourville.

I disassemble into yellow kiss. Above my head floats

an assembly of arms. I am uneasy with what I’ll become.

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GIOVANNI

Edmund White 

 

What’s left of an ex in my memory? 

He was kind and courtly (as he should have been 

Since he was a Sicilian aristocrat), 

When he wasn’t being horrid if I stepped 

Out of line, then frozen with fury and  

Unforgiving. He taught me one good pasta 

Recipe, Pasta alla Norma, with fried eggplant. He 

Bought me a CD player when mine broke, several  

Cashmere blankets, and he restored a leather 

Club chair that was in tatters. He was a doctor, could play 

The harpsichord, cook a few dishes, entertain 

In his battleship-sized loft, lie and cheat convincingly,  

Make the sort of love a heterosexual Mediterranean  

Male might make, selfish and athletic—and which I liked  

Because it never dwindled away even after we broke up. 

We both cried a lot. He had a black ceramic vase with an 

African face and a crown, until I explained that 

Was unacceptable in politically correct New York. 

Then it was banished, as was I when I told his new  

Lover that Giovanni and I were still having sex. I saw a good shrink 

And got over him. I’ll never have another lover— 

Too much of a bother. Once in a while I wish we could 

Speak on the phone, to find out whether his father’s  

Parkinson’s is progressing, whether his little brother  

Got married, and did he ever discover a cure for that  

Kind of breast cancer. And does he still hate me?  

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A MOMENT OF TENDERNESS

Vincent Antonio Rendoni

 

I witnessed something beautiful, friends

One day,

on my father’s monthly visit
to give his father
some money

Abuelo,

who kicked him out at sixteen
who didn’t believe in touch or mercy

caught his son limping

& put away the contempt fathers have for sons
& suspended the law of machismo reached for the rusted Texaco box
with the antiseptic, tweezers & gauze
slapped his knee
& called to his son’s feet,
& began working his way
through the skin & blood
of a used car salesman’s ingrown toenail

& never thought, not even once

as he cut through the keratin
cleaning & washing the lowest part
of working folk
that this is something
a man has to think about.

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Boundary Waters

Donald Platt

 

Accessible primarily by canoe, the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, in northeast Minnesota . . . extends 150 miles along the U.S.-Canada border, covering approximately 1,098,000 acres . . .
— Explore Minnesota

 

I want to go

to the Boundary Waters, canoe its one thousand lakes,

hundreds of miles

 

of rivers. So many places I’ve never been. I’d like to see sunset

reflected in Tuscarora

Lake, when it’s so still you cannot tell the difference

 

between sky on fire

and water on fire. Rosanne and I could paddle together

in our red canoe

 

to the very middle of the lake. Her hair would outshine sunset.

One loon would call

to another loon with its otherworldly wail from across

 

wide water.

That’s all I want to hear. But Rosanne, who has been to the Boundary

Waters and back,

 

tells me gently, firmly, matter-of-factly—in the voice

I love more

than any other woman’s voice—that no, I will never go as far

 

as Tuscarora

Lake. My body with its nerve pain, unable to walk anymore

without its rollator,

 

would not be able to do even one long portage.

She’s right, of course.

And even if I were to canoe that cold, aquifer-fed water

 

so clear I can see

twenty feet down to the rocky bottom, always another

waterway is waiting.

 

Night calls me with its unanswerable cry. Death’s loon

cries out

to me to come, come. Canoe to him alone across

 

dark, starlit water

where the moon now rises. Keep him company upon those other

boundaryless waters.

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Weight of Water

Allison Field Bell

 

Yesterday at the kitchen sink, my lover told me again
how I can’t do it right—load the dishwasher, wash the cast iron.
No soap, no scrubbing. My hands submerged in water, scalding.

 

Today, I’d rather be a fish. Scales, gills, unblinking eyes. Curl
around the toxic tentacles of that blooming mass: the anemone.
Brilliant orange and white stripes against the rainbow of reef.

 

None of that anxiety that dwells in the stomach, hollows it out, drops
it to the knees. The way my lover yelled when I panicked—
shook and shimmied. Too much, too much.

 

Too much pressure from the weight of water above,
but not feeling the ear-popping ascent from the depths of
the sandy floor. Water crushing bones. A whole sea of it to live in.

 

I’d like to be a shark. A predator. Free in my own kingdom.
Beast so ancient, so full of its own history, so full of its
own instinct. So full. So unlike the way I am. Sitting on the edge

 

of the bed now, my lover beyond a slammed door. I wonder
what it is to escape something. Where it is I could go. Beyond
the twist of whitewater, the shallow sand shelf to the deep

 

underbelly of sea, cold dark infinite. Bliss, all that water, swimming.

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MISSING THE FARM

Travis Mossotti

 

Here’s the orchard someone else will tend to.
And the crawl space beneath the porch
of the house where someone else’s barn cat
will slumber through the summer nights
dreaming of long-tailed mice in the high grass.
Over that field, the light dips and refracts
through the broken glass of the muck pond
where a catfish will take someone else’s bait
and hook—that it might meet the refined
heat of a skillet. The ghosts of a thousand
head of cattle walk through the woods at night
in someone else’s dream while the windows,
cracked slightly, let a mild breeze pass
through the empty rooms like an appraiser.
There is no death that cannot be undone
by simply turning the compost with a pitchfork
or by scattering scratch in the dirt for chickens
who sing each time they lay, but every repair
is only a gesture against the torment of slow
winds and steady rain and heavy sun. It will be
someone else who grows too old to climb
the ladder into the barn’s cool loft or the flight
of stairs that lead to and from their own bed.
It will be their hand weighing the mortgage.
It will be their face forgetting its smile. Listen,
if the well pump kicks to life at dawn, it will be
someone else drawing a bath for the last time—
joints relaxing as their form submerges, body
recovering and failing in the same held breath.

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I WANNA BE WRONG

Michael Chang

 

wanna sleep till i see u again
words u generally wanna hear
except when ur already at their haus
hey do u wanna get outta here
i like it when u talk abt cannes
so much
i like it so much
i’m a same-sex couple
a warehouse
nothing in me but a grand piano
stop staring
start tearing
if u’d changed u wouldn’t be here
did u see my present
the one i left
believing u could be deterred
i think i threw it out
as they used to say in hollywood
that movie sold popcorn
he asked to take me to the pound shop
but it was just a dollar tree
u go to the disco, panic
they want a better look at u
any acknowledgment of their infinitesimal existence
as mark twain’s old saw has it
the difference between a fire & a firefly
rain that looks like u, clean sheets
we luv to be intrusive
take an invasive procedure
make it more invasive
find it hard to leave relationships
luv being in luv w/ machines
money from a white-shoe firm
in fact a frozen-foods conglomerate
angel cakes bearing lines of credit
do not be afraid

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I Woke Up Eating Donuts in the Rain

Jarrett Moseley

 

is the note I left for myself
on the introduction page
of a poetry book
three years ago.

 

I did not wake up eating donuts in the rain
except for once
when I was a kid
and even then I was dreaming.

 

I’m always dreaming
of an elsewhere
where the reams of grass
I tucked into a wicker basket
last July have not withered
and the grease of fast food
slides off my fingers like sunlight
and a child touches a mirror, feeling
unlike a severed power line.

 

I was not that child.
When I was nine, I wrote a song
about the black tongue of death
before I even knew what it looked like.

 

I don’t know what to make of that
or if everything is a river
though I keep having the persistent feeling
that everything is supposed to be a river
even bad things
like loneliness.

 

Three years ago, I was lonely
and writing sad notes to myself
like screaming into a shower head.

 

Since then
Mason died
and Savanah moved to New York
and Gracie left New York for L.A.
and Sarah gave birth
and I decided against writing summary poems
but here I am.

 

When I say I’m always dreaming
that’s not what I mean
but that there’s a place inside me called outwards
where each thing faces away
from the next thing.

 

The couch back pushed against another couch back
which is facing away from the mirror
which is facing away from the window
which is facing away from the outside lawn
which is facing away from the world’s
violent unbuckling.

 

You can just say a lot of things
and get away with it
and even without music
or a bicycle wreck set on a loop forever
or waving one’s arms in circles from a distance

 

but once love gets involved
the whole thing turns red-tinted and jutted.

 

The last person who touched me naked,
we didn’t even have sex
we didn’t even know each other
we just slept in the same bed
with our feet barely brushing,
which is more intimate than sex
then never spoke again.

 

I could write an entire symphony
on things more intimate than sex.

 

I slap the back of a friend,
a boy holds the book at just the right angle,
we watch the car skid out on the road.

 

The news blurs into the radio,
a stone reverses back through a window,
the ground is seared with footprints.

 

Remember you are a river—
maybe that’s what the note should have said,
to move inside the banks of my body
through absolute loneliness
to write not about the leaf stuck in my hair
but rather, the wind that put it there.

 

Three years ago I was not having sex,
no one was sleeping in my bed,
my shoulder was like a stick in the mud,
and I didn’t even dream.

 

But today,
on the 12th of March,
pollen scattered like yellow DNA
across the glass porch table
that points outwards

 

into the community courtyard
where a girl mounts her pink tricycle
as her father pushes behind,
into the 70-degree warmth
swarming the dogwood trees
and the cardinals they carry,
into the peace of learning
to love the cliché
of blooming hope,

 

I open a poetry book and read
the note I had forgotten about.

 

Sometimes
you don’t want to dream.
Sometimes you don’t want to think
about death
or loneliness
or even sex.

 

You want to wake up
eating donuts in the rain,
to feel the river rise,
and to float a letter
to yourself
from one world
hoping it finds you
happily in the next.

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Dirty Moon Dog

Francine Witte

 

Tonight is the night
of the Dirty Moon,
where dust and scrub
show up thumbprint
on the lunar face.
Visible here on Earth
for only a speck,
showing itself quiet
in July or maybe
November. No one
talks about the Dirty
Moon the way no one
talks about the second
Love goes cold, maybe
one less phone call,
one less kiss, or
the way your parents
go see-through,
translucent on
their way to being
gone. But tonight,
right now, a dog
is howling it out.
He is alone
in a field, around
him the worry
of wheat, a shush,
a soft wind trying
to quiet him, his snout
full up, his mouth open
wide into the night.

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Two Poems

Rebecca Foust

Ocean Beach

I am not quite thirty again
on a beach under a three-quarter moon
slung low in the sky, stars pricking
darkness & so cold where the tide
rushes in, swirling ankles then knees
& you swooping me up in your arms
like any fantasy of rescue & I’m ravished
in John Donne’s sense of the word
& pretty much every sense
of the word, licked up & down my spine
by freezing flame, slicked wet
like a dog in the rain, every nerve
buzzing bees in a beauty bush June—
it happens every time I return
to memory’s long, low curve of cold sand,
the swallowed surge of a wave,
held breath knocked out & away
into liquefaction & release,
an icicle held in your warm, bare hand.

 

Pasiphae

In a myth from the southern sea
a woman loved a god
in the guise of a bull, or maybe
it was the sea, or maybe
it was a bull made of waves
that came from behind
all muscle & surge
to her knees, waist, chest,
throat, mouth & eyes, then left
with the morning tide.

 

They say she near died, burned
by sorrow & salt & sun
before she thought to build
a bull of wood she could live
within. For she was also a god
who could drain all she filled
& fill all she drained
like us, who daily dwell
in a world that swallows us whole,
while we take it, holy, inside.

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Captive

Nicole Santalucia

 

for Lesley, Patty, Kathy, and Eileen

 

I woke up in a zoo feeding penguins
that looked like grandmothers I would’ve
knocked down to get a cigarette,
but I quit smoking two years ago
when I came face to face with
a skunk in my backyard. Monday
is garbage night—this I know.
There was a time when I didn’t
know I had a drug problem then
there was a time when I did. The knowing
trapped and released me. We fenced
in the backyard last spring to keep out
little critters, and now I have land sickness.
Anne gave us Jack-in-the-pulpits that have been
in the family for generations. I never thought
this scarlet, orange fruit would blossom again and
again and again—that I’d take responsibility without
taking blame. Taking has nothing to do with Mondays
and Tuesdays. I take the weekend to grow tomatoes.
I always take more and the devil’s ear listens
to my spiritual disease. So does Mr. and Mrs. Brown,
and Mrs. Jones down the street wants to put the house
in her name. If the loan doesn’t go through, she might
get drunk and I might get struck by lightning.
I thought it was just me, but it’s also the landscape.
Here at the river of denial, I refuse the weather,
and people who drank like me have been hiding
in the bushes this whole time. The people who
drank like Kathy just sent her a nice check from
a bar she invested in years ago. And my inner
Eileen says we won’t get struck drunk. She hated
zoos and every penguin in town knew it. She
also had pulmonary emphysema and was rescued
by inhaling and exhaling. She taught us not to think
about thinking and how to die without dying.
We are at war with the skunks. This inner protest
and hot head of cauliflower are part of the ritual.
I place my palm on the source of heat and prepare
to listen with my whole body. I begin with tubers
and work my way to the leafy greens then open
myself up to the rage and wild onions climbing
over the fence to choke out the tree-of-heaven.

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8 Facts about the Atlantic Horseshoe Crab

Bex Hainsworth

 

1.) They are not actually crabs, but faux-crustaceans,

aquatic scorpions; arthropods with arachnid-kin.

 

2.) Triassic reverberations, they are their own ancestors,

unchanged fossils, 230 million years in the making.

 

3.) Called Limulus Polyphemus, after the Odyssean cyclops,

but unborn embryos have nine eyes and a sense of irony.

 

4.) Liminal in existence, they live in the gaps between land

and sea: the brackish, the shallows, the world’s edges.

 

5.) Their distinctive carapace – armour, disguise, barnacled

island – is regularly moulted, left behind like pottery.

 

6.) Females are larger than males, often scarred from mating,

when suitors cling to the rafts of their bodies for months.

 

7.) Each spring, they are spades, digging nests in the same sand

where they were spawned; 64,000 eggs shine like blue pearls.

 

8.) Their blood is used in medical research. We claim catch and

release, hands slick, harvesting the sea in search of immortality.

 

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Honeymoon

James Davis May

 

We were about to die, but it seemed so funny:
the sudden storm cloud unfolding above us
as if we were a pair of cartoon characters
having a bad day. We could see the beach,
our empty chairs, and the other couples
holding drinks and each other’s hands,
while for each stroke shoreward, the sea
(the wind or the waves or both?) pushed
our rented kayak two feet seaward. You knew
my hockey-shattered shoulder weakened us
in one direction. I knew that pain
was better than drowning. Ten years later
you ask what I’d say to the couple we were
in those first years of debt, lost jobs,
and the baby we almost lost but didn’t.
I tell you I’d want to say, “Calm down, kids,
don’t worry so much.” But I take that back.
Think of the storm and how our fear made us
paddle harder and taught us to do it together.

 

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POEM WITH NO FORWARDING ADDRESS

Cynthia Atkins

 

They left without warning, no note taped

to a mirror, no trace or teaser.  No lipstick

marks, sealed an envelope.  With boarded up

windows like the soul of it gone astray—

like a dog lost from home.

At a moment’s notice—

Pizza crust left on the counter.

Dust balls on the sills. Mice eating the mattress offal.

An emptiness where there was a banter of life—

                         —music, doorbells, loud hammers.

A couple arguing in a new language,

then making up all night. The smell of eggs cooking

at dawn.  The children groggy from sleep, awaken to finish

their homework.  Pencils tapping syllables into place.

Hats hung on a hook, the fire crackling in the stove.

A drawer of mittens and gloves.

Winter snow boots waiting to make tracks.

       Why must we practice leaving and loss?—

The tender missives on the refrigerator door—

Family snapshots, quotes, buttons, magnets.

Simple objects that tell us where we live, who we are.

Home, where we take the stones out of our shoes.

 

 

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Zipper

John Paul Davis

 

We were born in the era
of having to balance
our checkbooks

 

& we’ve lived
through that to the time
of tracking transactions
with handheld computers

 

which are also telephones
we only use when we must
though I’ll confess

 

when you were overseas
I’d call your voicemail
just to hear you
say your own name

 

which is my first favorite music.
Second is your keys
dancing in the deadbolt
when you get home from work

 

& third, the sound of your laugh
on the other side of a wall.

 

You mumble in your sleep
& do vocal warm-ups in the shower
& eat cereal in bed yes

 

this is the age of eating in bed
while watching the best television
on tiny screens, this is the era

 

of falling asleep in our clothes
with the light on holding
each other, this is the year
of staying home & mumbling

 

sweetly to each other locking
fingers & inventing novel
ways of expressing our feelings
without words for example

 

there’s the metallic
percussion when I tug
apart your zipper

 

in the doorway by the bucket
where we keep our outdoor shoes,
there’s the creak of floorboards
as I kneel, there’s the quiet rabbit
of your hand in mine.

 

Even when we’re miles apart
my body is a playlist streaming
to yours, my ankles & beard
& earlobes & forearms & belly button

 

& every hair, all of my pink
skin, I’m an afternoon of song
arranged in this specific order
for you. Dance to me, wash

 

dishes to me, sing along to me folding
laundry, read a play
with me on in the background
take me with you on your long commute,
dark of my voice in your headphones.

 

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From the Jeopardy! category SPOILER ALERTS

Julie Marie Wade

First, the light & how to describe it—part Manila envelope, part Ticonderoga pencil. Casserole golden at times, then orange as a giant brick of cheese, then brown as tater tots crammed into cargo pant pockets. Idaho may make you squint & squirm, crave some nachos, drink raw eggs from a glass. Yes, the chickens have large talons. It’s an underdog state fit for an underdog story. Note the tetherball sun & the boondoggle clouds. Note the iconic llama cameo. (There’s a small chance our cat is called Tina because of this film.) Second, the plot & how to recount it—Uncle Rico never did throw a football over them mountains, never did strike it rich selling knock-off Tupperware or breast-enhancing supplements. But Pedro shaved his head & became class president. Kip & LaFawnduh fell in love online, then boarded a Greyhound bus together. And our eponymous protagonist, unlikely hero of the Gemstone State, won a talent show dancing to Jamiroquai’s “Canned Heat.” Preston seems a sparse, dry place, far from the grid, nary the site of a tourist’s pilgrimage. Dust coats bicycle tires & Rollerblades, hovers above the highways like an unholy halo. It would be nice if you could pull me into town. Third, the supporting cast & how we remember them—Grandma breaks her coccyx on a dune buggy ride; Starla blushes at a Bust Must testimonial; Rex dubs himself sensei of his own dojo while clad in Hammer pants fashioned from an American flag. Critics called it a “quirky charmer,” a “one-hit wonder,” a “weird-ass fairy tale.” They’re not wrong. If you got it, odds are you drew some ligers in your notebooks, too, took some Glamour shots in your basement once upon a time. Now just imagine you’re weightless, in the middle of the ocean, surrounded by tiny seahorses. If you loved it, you’re probably more Deb than Summer Wheatley to this day. More enterprising than prize-winning perhaps, but with a certain staying power, the paradox of which is the way it helps you leave. (Even then, Deb was earning money for college with her home-woven handicrafts.) What amazes me is how we all know a Summer Wheatley, don’t we? Mine was Marissa Sheldon, was Kendra Kostrich, was Julie Winder—who still lives in my town & works at the bowling alley. The other two are unfindable on Facebook. They were cheerleaders way back when, with ESPRIT sweatshirts slipping off their slender shoulders & Keds tennis shoes forever bright-white as the day they bought them. They washed their hair with exotic products like Pantene & VO5 clarifying shampoo. Somehow they always chewed gum the teachers never confiscated, ate Funyuns & SweeTarts by the carton but never gained weight. These were the girls who had it easy or made it look easy—it’s hard to know which. They never seemed to sweat or stink or spill on their clothes, let alone bleed. Whatever they said became Gospel. Whatever they did set the newest trend. But they don’t make many movies about the goodfits, do they? Summer Wheatley isn’t a film in my Netflix queue. I wonder about her, though, like I wonder about Marissa & Kendra & Julie, who shared my name but not my story. Is Summer snickering at her boss from behind her Steno-thin cubicle walls, sending NSFW memes at work, cyberbullying on the Moms of Preston message board? Or maybe she’s flirting with customers at Big J’s Burgers, some of whom remember her when, one of whom offered to pay for Botox if she’d spend one night with him. “What do you think this is—Indecent Proposal?” But then she did it because Trisha, her still-BFF, said she should. Both of them are tired of the old joke: “Is it I-da-ho or you-da-ho?” Tired of guys who stop by for some curly fries & to reminisce about the Happy Hand Jobs Club. “I swear that’s what it was called,” Don smirks, like he’s been smirking all his life. Maybe Summer married him right after high school. Maybe they have a tribe of towheaded children by now. Or maybe they’re divorced but still fight daily over the phone. Can’t stop running into each other in their one exit ramp town. If there’s a moral to this story, it’s that you can make a piñata of whomever you like. Better, perhaps—a piñata of whatever you want. Don’t ask the principal for permission. Just go outside, close your eyes & strike with all your might.

“What is Napoleon Dynamite?”

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At the Delachaise


Julia Johnson

You tell me your husband is really a leopard.
I tell you that you've had too much wine.
You insist that he has all of the qualities and attributes and characteristics
and the coloring of a leopard. And that he loves you for your beauty.
I ask why you didn't know this when you first met him
and you insist you did and I ask why you would marry a leopard.
You say that you knew no one would want to meet him but that you
had to marry him. I tell you I can't wait to meet him
and I promise I really do.
I really do want to meet him.
We share a tall cone of fries in white paper.
At the end of the night, we take off our masks and step onto the sidewalk,
and kiss each other in the air instead of touching.
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Announcing the Winner of the Editor’s Prize for Poetry

Congratulations to Caleb A.P. Parker, our 2023 winner for the Editor’s Prize in Poetry! His poem, “Palinode,” will be available to read in our Spring 2024 issue.

Caleb A.P. Parker, a writer and musician from the industrialized Gulf Coast of Texas, was raised by two Episcopal priests. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, Colorado Review, Ninth Letter, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and currently lives in New York City.

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Announcing the Winner of the 2023 Editor’s Prize for Poetry

 

We are delighted to announce our 2023 Editor’s Prize for Poetry Winner and Finalists! Congrats to: Caleb Parker, Bertha Crombet, Michael Weinstein, and Maggie Yang. All winners receive $1,000 and publication in The Florida Review 48.1, Spring, 2024.Our 2024 contest opens in January. Thank you for supporting The Florida Review!

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Show us your poems!

The Florida Review wants to read your work.

Our submission portal is now open for poetry! We’re interested in poems with emotional and intellectual depth, poems that have texture and verve. Check out our submission guidelines, then submit here.

 

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Two Poems

Halloween: Ends

Michael Myers at the 711 filling up his SUV.
Michael Myers at Home Depot buying fancy drill bits he doesn’t really need.
Michael Myers sitting in the back of the room at the PTA meeting, scrolling through Tinder.
Michael Myers doing taxes.
Michael Myers scrolling through Facebook in the movie theater.
Michael Myers at couple’s counseling.
Michael Myers letting the dog out one night and telling the kids it ran away.
Michael Myers killing all the sex workers in Grand Theft Auto.
Michael Myers sitting in the back pew at church, scrolling through Tinder.
Michael Myers mowing the lawn on a beautiful Sunday afternoon.
Michael Myers wearing an apron that says I Rub My Own Meat.
Michael Myers getting drunk at his Superbowl party.
Michael Myers explaining the differences between a bratwurst and a sausage to a woman looking at her phone.
Michael Myers renting Saw IV again on Amazon Prime.
Michael Myers taking his mask off to have sex but leaving his socks on.
Michael Myers toweling off in the locker room.
Michael Myers rubbing against people on the train.
Michael Myers at the hotel bar explaining the difference between bourbon and whisky to a woman looking at her phone.
Michael Myers calling up toiletries and answering the door in his bathrobe each time.
Michael Myers ordering his burger well-done.
Michael Myers sending his food back twice.
Michael Myers not tipping.

 

Another autumn

                        after Mikey Swanberg

 

walking the mile
to work,

 

freezing in the morning,
sweating on the way back,

 

each step a stitch
quilting the heavy blanket

 

of our unhappiness.
Nothing has happened,

 

and still—

 

I imagined my lover

might show up

 

in my office
before I left,

 

shut the door
and we would fuck

 

quietly on the desk

 

to the rhythm

of the copy machine.

 

In another version,
he’d walk out to me

 

halfway along the mile,

stitching his own path,

 

and say something
he was never going to say,

 

that he had changed, and I
had changed, but

 

all for the better,
and we were stronger for it,

 

as though love
were a sourdough,

 

dying then restarting,
grown through being given away.

 

How long did I believe that time
was the most costly thing.

 

What a hard bargain
to find it is the only thing.

 

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west country

the bad thing is too big to look at. the bad thing is heavy. when i kick the bad thing, its side caves in like an old football. i put the bad thing in my backpack. i walk with the bad thing to the train stop. the bad thing and i buy a pasty from warrens. i throw the wrapper away, but i can’t throw the bad thing away. at church the bad thing lights candles. at home the bad thing holds my hand. when i talk to the bad thing, the bad thing talks back sometimes. when i read to the bad thing, the bad thing listens. the bad thing likes television. the bad thing likes location, location, location. the bad thing says it might go away if i took it on a country walk, but the bad thing is lying. the bad thing sings to itself, very softly, under its breath. the bad thing wants me to listen. i don’t want to listen to the bad thing. i want to leave the bad thing alone, by itself, in an empty room. the bad thing likes this room. the bad thing helps me close the door, so that we are in this room together.

 

 

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Rain

Correlation is not causation, but few things correlate more to a mood than rain.

 

Do people still come down with “a case of the vapors”?

 

What is weather if not causality in a landscape?

 

When it rains it pours. How does the Morton Salt Girl maintain her kicky attitude, happy under that umbrella and never bored with life?

 

Half the idiots in charge of this country don’t even know enough to come in out of the rain.

 

The Great Plains are basically a desert and thus Nebraska is a fairly dry state. In Lincoln, my Grandpa Boo was obsessed with his rain gauge, and therefore I, too, obsessed became.

 

Raining cats and dogs may come from the Greek cata doxa, “contrary to experience or belief.” I can’t believe how hard it’s raining!

 

Swipe a fingertip heart in the misty windowpane.

 

I hate to be the one to say it, but your parade’s going to get rained on.

 

Never have I ever been so depressed as when I lived for one year in the Pacific Northwest. It literally always rains and people metaphorically are always taking rainchecks. The Seattle No, I later learned it was termed, aka the Seattle Freeze.

 

A rain of arrows. Soot and ash raining down. What is life but a rain of blows?

 

This is the third year in a row that the rains have failed.

 

A peer-reviewed study found that of all 50 states, Washington ranked 48th for the trait of extraversion.

 

Gentle rain on the roof is as pleasing as alliteration, day or night, right as rain.

 

Does rain like being the external correlative of sorrow? Of pain? That feeling of tears going into your ears when you’re lying on your back and crying.

 

When you listen to “Famous Blue Raincoat,” what shade of blue do you see?

 

At this point it’d take a meteor shower to get the earth really clean.

 

Droplets stitch the day with gray silken threads. Come rain or shine, the hits just keep coming.

 

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Call and Response

It is a hinge.

It is a flash splintering

the sky,

then a rumble.

Under ripe light,

it is pollen

furring the bees.

It is a wood thrush’s

song rising

from the backyard’s

green pulpit.

Over and over

one calls, insistent.

Then another

parses, flute-like

as the head

bobs. Tail flicks.

It is the link

embedded in us.

Think of

the old gospels

which require

a beating heart,

church hands

to answer.

No matter what

form it takes

it seems impossible

to disentangle.

And still the God-weld

split, despite my bows

and prayers

to save my son.

You were silent.

 

 

This poem originally appeared in our 46.2 issue, and was a runner-up for The Florida Review‘s 2022 Humboldt Poetry Prize.

Prize judge David Keplinger’s citation: “In this delicately achieved lyric, like the prayer it references, rife with “pollen/furring the bees,” and the “backyard’s/green pulpit,” the natural world is imbued with sacred qualities, though the speaker’s calls to save the unnamed son are not answered. Nevertheless, the poem honors the tangled music of this realm, offering the song of the wood-thrush, “flute-like,” as embodiment of this grief.”

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Sunset

After Jim Harrison

 

On this excursion my hands were folded,

I tried not to see anything, didn’t pick up the pole,

let him do all the work, he took every turn

for the both of us—promising I would be amazed

at any moment, soon enough, and I fucking doubt it

I replied, wanting something more from my time,

as though each of my moments were precious

and meant to be filled with golden sap, we,

through mangrove canals where pregnant

wolf spiders ran their fingers through my hair,

and blackened crabs climbed from root to root,

the water moved past our boat like soft hands

swimming in still water, paddled toward the sunset

when two boar, nose-to-tail, took to the water to cross

from shore to shore oblivious of us one way or another

and now is a good time to define what our time is worth.

 

 

This poem originally appeared in our 46.2 issue, and was a runner-up for The Florida Review‘s 2022 Humboldt Poetry Prize.

Prize judge David Keplinger’s citation: “On a miserable excursion through mangrove canals, rife with crabs and spiders, what seems a resistant young person sits with hands folded as an older figure tries to amaze and awaken them; and they do; they do awaken to the worth of this moment with its boars crossing the shore “oblivious of us” in that instant of marvelous connection with the natural world.”

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Two Poems

Witness Statement

And, behold, in the year
of unencumbered plague

 

those who trafficked in wickedness
did so on palatial golf courses.

 

An orphan cried for succor
and received spit.

 

Nothing of this was new
or profound, only more naked.

 

And, lo, I fed my son a breakfast
bar on a dying planet.

 

And on a dying planet
the wicked watered

 

my son’s playground with poisons.
They hallowed his oceans with lead.

 

Tell me what should I have done
but bathe bread in peanut butter

 

mince Flintstones in a cup of cola.
And, lo, the wicked thought only

 

of my boy as a horsetail dreams
of flies. His chest rose and fell

 

as we both tacked the garbage
truck rumbling its track.

 

In this was no sin.
In this was only another

 

form of hunger: the truckness
of the truck begetting wonder

 

begetting want. Oh, felt my boy
with every rattling atom.

 

And the wicked kenneled
a brown boy so like my son.

 

I said, I am sickened.
I said, I will maim you

 

with my claws before you
take their boy, my boy whose laugh

 

turns this truck ripe with refuse
to some radiant blessing.

 

Anubis at the DMV

Let me be blunt:

            fate is no whim.

 

It is the voice of

            a thousand bureaucrats intoning

                        now serving 554.

 

If diligence is a knife

            you are our bread.

 

if service is a repeating decimal

            a herd of digits flashed to life

                        you’re dead last.

            Ultimo.

                        The sarcophagal cero.

 

Each attendant is a monolith

                        in a desert you wander

                                    an hour, a lifetime.

 

Who can know?

            The intervals grow

                        immeasurable.

 

Think of a cat

            toying mindlessly with a string

                        an entire day

            bored

                        somnambular.

 

Past the grave

            vice or virtue is simply

                        the dust we brush off.

 

Let it accumulate.

            Let the carpet fiber

                        crack beneath your feet

 

Now you want to know

            how much longer

                        a day, a year, a league.

 

Like all dictators

            I simply push the beads

                        across, then back.

 

Who am I

            to enumerate

                        your wait time?

 

Who to tell you

            how to spend your death?

 

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